One of the most interesting things about our imminently-published Sworn Virgin is that Clarissa Botsford translated it from Italian, not Albanian – author Elvira Dones wrote her first few books in Albanian, but has since switched to her ‘adopted tongue’ of Italian. In his foreword, Ismail Kadare explains that this kind of tongue-switching is “a tradition that goes back to the late middle ages, when the Ottomans prohibited written Albanian and our writers used Latin as a second language”. 

Today on twitter we asked you for other examples of literary #tongueswitching – here’s the results! 

Ann Morgan and Theresa Mallinson kicked us off with Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who moved from writing in English to Gikuyu (which he then self-translates into English). Matthew Todd gave us Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian (with sneaky plugs for Nabokov and Kundera). 

Matthew Todd mentioned Ouyang Yu, who switched from Chinese to English when he moved to Australia, and moving onto self-translation, Ann Morgan recommended Montengrin author Ksenija Popovic, who self-translated her book into Lullaby for No Man’s Wolf: you can read Ann’s thoughts on the book here