About the editors, authors bzw. contributors

 

Armine Asryan (Nane Sevunts)

I was born and grew up in a little village in Armenia. After my mom and dad divorced and my mom remarried, we moved to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. I have lived there ever since.

My characters are born from my personal life and reflect my story. However, writing gives me space to be imaginative and create a life that is different from reality. Creativity, imagination, and challenges – these are the things that drive me to write.

 

Alejandra Baccino

Mostly Uruguayan. My passion for languages inspired me to become a translator; my passion for medicine and caring led me to pursue nursing; and, my passion for free fruit and pies prompted me to turn into a runner. Just trying my best.

 

Gennady Bondarenko

Anonymous.

 

Marilin Guerrero Casas

My name is Marilin Guerrero, but you can call me Mary. I live in Cuba, a beautiful island in the Caribbean full of many cheerful and friendly people you can easily call your family.  I’m 29 but I can tell you that I still feel like I’m 20 years old. So you may agree with me that the first step to stay young is to believe it. I’m a language teacher, translator, social media content writer, bookstagrammer and shortly I’ll become a youtuber. What a crazy thing! The fact is that I’m a multi-tasking person and I love all this creativity growing inside of me. I have a bachelor’s degree in English and French and an online master’s degree in TEFL. I love writing, reading books, learning and teaching languages, listening to music and sharing time with my friends. I’m a very determined, responsible perfectionist, as well as hard-working, sociable and funny. But above all, I think my greatest gift is to face life with a never-ending smile. I have always had this strong desire to write, so I hope to finish my own book in the near future. At the moment, I am working in a foreign publishing house where I feel at ease as a professional and can combine perfectly my passion for reading and writing. I like to visit historical and cultural spots, so learning about other people’s lifestyles is something I’m always interested in. What I love the most about writing is that I can truly spread my wings and fly, letting my emotions roam free to touch someone else, someone I may or may not know. It’s there where the real magic lies.

 

Seyit Ali Dastan

Seyit is a researcher based in Turkey, specialized in the politics and economics of energy supply. But in a different universe, he translates, while also liking literature and thinking about stories, scripts, and poems, which he doesn’t dare to write. When he was a little kid, he wondered whether the image in the mirror was real and he was the image. Now, Seyit is concerned that he may be a robot as he barely proves to be a human in the CAPTCHA tests.

 

Angelika Friedrich

Greetings from the Bavarian hinterlands! I have worked as a translator for most of my life and seem to be quite a bit better at it than writing. There are a lot of options in life, and none of them are particularly good, but you make the best of it. Nothing will be fundamentally different next week or next year. Radical changes will not bring results even remotely as radical in any emotional, psychological or material sense. Lie on your back, stretch your arms up and inhale through your nose for ten seconds and then exhale through it for ten seconds as well. Time and again. Then go back to doing what you were doing before – it will get better.

 

Jonay Quintero Hernández

Obituary. In loving memory of Jonay Quintero Hernández (1978 – 2020), tender husband and father to a turtle, a dog and a 7-year-old (not in that order). Finally, as of today, he has made the decision to move to another neighborhood and no longer torture others with his pointless stories.

When alive and after earning a university degree in English Philology and performing a miscellanea of different duties, he became a translator of English and French into Spanish, letting a wide audience of 600 million Spanish speakers learn what is so great about Shakespeare and Moliere. Ignoring the pleas of his friends and family not to do so, he also got involved in writing and has committed, among others, the outrageous lines you might have already seen in the previous pages.

He allegedly still accepts commissions and work through his translator profile from the Other World but firmly discourages the use of Ouija boards for that purpose as their signal is not particularly good.

His family will never get to forget him and debt collectors could not lay their hands on him. May he rest in peace.

 

Krisztina Janosi

Born and raised in Hungary, a translator, copywriter and ex-wannabe-good mum, who occasionally writes serious fiction stories based on not so serious real-life events.

 

Sarah-Leah Pimentel

By writing my story, I discover myself. By writing our collective stories, I encounter the “you” that resides within me and allow myself to live, for a fleeting moment, your experience. Stories by Toni Wallis are a mixture of autobiography and the vignettes of people she has met. South Africa is a multicultural society with different realities and socioeconomic backgrounds. The country’s dark history of apartheid and its difficult transition to democracy provide the backdrop for many of her stories. These tales are an exploration of differences that separate us, but also the common humanity that binds us together in sorrow, joy, tribulation and victory. It is her hope that the literary space of encounter can be a bridge to build a society that is more tolerant and compassionate to the reality of people that may, at first glance, appear to be very different from ourselves.

 

Yuri Smirnov

I am witnessing a tragedy and cannot really speak. Things can go terribly wrong terribly quickly. In my work and in this project, I try to contribute a different perspective. Whether that has any merit in the face of life and death, is hard for me to say. I want to believe it, and thought we were beyond wars, drafts, destruction and the ruining of already modest lives, but life has proved me wrong.

 

Adriana Uribe

Adriana was born in Colombia before the undeclared war among parties became the war among cartels. An adventurous childhood for reasons beyond her control gave her the training she needed to navigate the unexpected challenges adult life offered. Adriana counts her capability to observe as her most important asset, which combined with a seasoned skill for translation, allows her to interpret not only between two languages spoken by more than two thirds of the population around the world, but also to interpret some other languages such as the one people speak with their bodies and the one the stars speak to every living being.

Given the fact that this life has been and continues to be a succession of adventures, Adriana aspires to complete it so as to never return to this dimension. In the meantime, she will continue finding new languages to learn and interpret for no other purpose than to keep herself entertained.

 

Ina Maria Vogel

Translator. Occasional writer. Language nerd. Recovering diplomat. Collector of air sickness bags (unused).

 

Henry Whittlesey

He is a translator, editor and writer chasing perfection in literature and the arts.