NORA NADJARIAN: Calendars and... Second Tongue

Friday, December 11, 2009

Calendars and... Second Tongue

I've been busy with all sorts of projects lately.

The UNHCR calendar project is coming to an end. Hopefully I'll soon be able to tell you about a beautiful 2010 calendar of poems I helped to select. More on that later.

Something totally wonderful and unexpected this week: I found out that my talented (and funny) Fictionaut buddy Finnegan Flawnt who writes in flawless English...is, in fact, German! Together with the brilliant Dorothee Lang (designer of the lovely logo you can see above) who is also a German writing in English, they invited me to set up the group "Second Tongue" on Fictionaut- a group for bilingual/multiligual writers. To give you a taste, here is a section of our group description:

"...It doesn't matter to us whether your first language is French, Chinese, Greek, Swahili, Italian, Urdu, or any other of the world's groovy languages:

Make this your home, share your English writing and discuss with us what it means, for you, not to write in your mother tongue.

We also welcome native English speakers, who live and write abroad or who write in another language than English..."

So happy to be a part of this! We hope to get many members, and I know there are a lot of people out there writing in a "second tongue". Watch this space.

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Biography

Nora Nadjarian is an award-winning Cypriot poet and writer. She has represented Cyprus at literary events and festivals in Europe and elsewhere, including Frankfurt Book Fair and Dresdner Bardinale and within the framework of EU2016, in the poetry project ‘In European Poetry I want to live’ (Amsterdam).

Her work has been cited or published in the Guardian, the Irish Times and the Telegraph and has also won prizes and commendations in international competitions, including the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, the Féile Filíochta International Poetry Competition, the Binnacle International Ultra-Short Competition and the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Prize. Her work deals with the themes of women, refugees, identity, exile, love and loss, as well as the political situation in Cyprus.

In Cyprus she is best known for her book of short stories “Ledra Street” (2006) but has had poetry and short fiction published internationally. Her work was included in A River of Stories, an anthology of tales and poems from across the Commonwealth, illustrated by Jan Pieńkowski, Best European Fiction 2011 (Dalkey Archive Press), Being Human (Bloodaxe Books, 2011) and Capitals (Bloomsbury, 2017).Her latest publication is the collection of short stories Selfie (Roman Books, 2017) and her short plays “Mermaid” and “Catalina” were recently performed at the Old Red Lion theatre in London.

Her special interest lies in the teaching of creative writing. In recent years she has facilitated several creative writing workshops– in English, Greek and German – at schools, universities and prisons in Cyprus and Germany.