Lisa Fransson: Only a child in Swedish

Lisa Fransson is a bilingual writer living on the south coast of England. In her native Swedish, she's an award-winning children's author, and in her adopted English she writes short fiction and novels, including her first novel, The Shape of Guilt, published by époque press. She also works as a literary translator and mentor to young writers, and writes the Substack This Writing Life.

We talk about how she gradually found her way into writing fiction in English after leaving Sweden at nineteen, and how years of working as a translator shaped her sense of language as something closer to meaning than to individual words. She talks about never having been schooled in English, and how that freed her from the fear of getting it wrong that native speakers often carry. She talks about reaching into Old English and Old Norse for her current novel, and about the deliberate discipline of keeping her Swedish children's writing free of English influence. And we get into what English has let her see clearly about her own upbringing that Swedish never could, and the story she still doesn't have the words for.