I just finished a residency through Literature Across Frontiers on the Culture Reset platform. Task: produce reflective essay on literary exchange, collaborate with peers on short translations.
Wrote the essay in English. Prepared dedicated Russian version, not translation, adaptation. Different rhetorical traditions, different assumptions about what “literary exchange” means. The Russian version had to argue for concepts the English version could assume.
That gap is the subject, which makes writing about it recursive and slightly maddening.
The essay examines what actually happens when writers from different language traditions meet. Not the official programme description but the messy reality. Misreadings that generate new work. Translation failures that reveal what each language takes for granted. The moments when code-switching isn’t deficit but discovery.
I wrote from experience: Gŵyl Arall in Caernarfon last year, Cardiff seminar in February, years of code-switching between Russian, English, Mandarin in various contexts. Literary exchange isn’t abstract. It’s specific moments when linguistic gaps become creative material rather than obstacles.
The essay went through LAF editorial process. Publishing in both languages means each version needs to work independently whilst addressing the same core questions. Harder than it sounds. English version assumes individual agency as default. Russian version has to contextualize that assumption as culturally specific.
Collaborated with peers on short translation experiments. Translating work by writers I met through LAF programmes. Small pieces, not full texts. Enough to understand their process and where English fails to capture what they’re doing.
This is the work I want to do more of: not just publishing novels but participating in the infrastructure that connects writers across language barriers. Essays, translations, workshops, exchanges. The connective tissue between national literatures.
LAF provides structure for this. Literature Wales, Cardiff University, festival partnerships. UK literary networks that take bilingual practice seriously rather than treating it as exotic addition.
Residency confirmed I want to deepen this engagement. Not just visiting for festivals but consistently participating in UK literary ecosystem. That requires being here, not just visiting.
Working on making that happen.
— Writer Julia Zolotova
