Creative Writing Workshop

FAMILY LEXICON:
WRITING FICTION IN A SECOND LANGUAGE

with Eleonora Balsano

 Ideas Festival  / Sun 22nd Nov / 11 am - 1 pm

Many multilingual people never try writing fiction because they think they aren't allowed to, since their vocabulary is too limited, their grammar isn't perfect and they’ve heard at some point in their lives that ‘real writers only write in their mother tongue’. None of this is true!

Many of the best novels of recent decades were written by people using a language they learned as adults. In this workshop we'll start from the words we all carry from childhood, the nicknames, family expressions and invented words that only make sense at home, and we'll use them as material for writing in the language we use now. Through short exercises, participants will see that writing in a second language can make their prose more precise and more personal, and that what they see as a limitation is often what makes their writing interesting.

If you speak more than one language and have always wanted to write fiction, whatever your level of experience, this is for you. 

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