Nina Chayka: It's impossible to heal the loss of a language, or a country

Nina Chayka is a Russian-American writer with a BA from Harvard, where she's currently pursuing a PhD.

We talk about her move to the US in high school and the deliberate push she made into English, setting herself a rule to use it as much as possible even when its grammar felt rigid next to Russian. She talks about her debut story collection, Seagulls, voices of exile after the war in Ukraine, and her decision to write those characters in clean English rather than give them an accent on the page. And we get into how the war changed her own relationship to Russian, and how English became, for her, a kind of neutral ground.