What I am working on at the moment...

The Proust Questionnaire

My partner being an absolute fan of Marcel, it was inevitable I’d include on this website my own version of The Proust Questionnaire!

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The principal aspect of your personality

Pessimism

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The quality that I desire in a man

Being a feminist

The quality that I desire in a woman

Intelligence

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Your chief characteristic

I think too much

What I appreciate most about my friends

Their moral support

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My main fault

Being hot-tempered

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My favourite occupation

Reading and travelling abroad to discover new languages and cultures

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My dream of happiness

Being rich enough to buy houses or flats in Italy, London, Paris and the Basque Country, and spend several months per year in each country

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What would be my greatest misfortune?

Living in an increasingly intolerant and nationalist world. Cf what happened in Europe between 1929 and 1945…

What I should like to be

More positive, confident in the future and myself, less anxious and being able to reject what is toxic for me

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The country where I should like to live

A thorny question for someone who lived in four countries: see my answer to “Your dream of happiness”! I’m not under the illusion that everything is perfect abroad anymore as I know how difficult it is to adapt to a new culture and how intolerant people can be with foreigners. But I terribly miss Italy and I’d like to move back there at some point. It’s a life goal that motivates me everyday to learn Italian and play the lottery (to buy my dream villa in Umbria or flat in Rome!)…

My favourite colour

Vivid red

The flower I like

Those with a strong smell

My favourite bird

Woodcocks

My favourite prose authors

Silvia Avallone, Zadie Smith, Elif Shafak, Cecile Coulon, Lucia Berlin, Pearl Buck, Jeffrey Eugenides, Carole Martinez, Irène Némirovsky, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt

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My favourite poets

Arthur Rimbaud, Federico Garcia Lorca, John Keats and Sylvia Plath for the dead ones. My list of contemporary poets would be way too long.

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My heroes in fiction

Joseph Vaughan in R.J. Ellory’s A Quiet Belief in Angels and E.M. Forster’s Maurice Hall in Maurice

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My favourite heroines in fiction

The Carrasco women in Carole Martinez’s The Threads of the Heart

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My favourite composers

Lili Boulanger and Maurice Ravel

My Favourite Visual Artists

My trip to Italy last January was invigorating. It reminded me how much visual arts matter to me, both as a writer and on a personal level. I wanted to share with you a list of the painters, sculptors and movements who inspire me and lift my spirits up:

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• Ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman art

• Italian Renaissance artists

• Sandro Botticelli

• Michelangelo

• Hans Holbein

• Il Caravaggio

• The Pre-Raphaelites (especially John Everett Millais, John William Waterhouse and Edward Burne-Jones)

• Camille Claudel

• Gustav Klimt

• Frida Kahlo

• Salvador Dalí 

• Charlotte Salomon

• Pop-surrealism

My 2019 Reading List

• Six Basque Poets: Rikardo Arregi, Bernardo Atxaga, Felipe Juaristi, Miren Agur Meabe, Kirmen Uribe, Joseba Sarrionandia - Arc Publications (Poetry)

• Flèche - Mary Jean Chan (Poetry)

• Les ronces - Cécile Coulon (Poetry) 

• Une bête au paradis - Cécile Coulon (Novel) 

• Elias Portolu - Grazia Deledda (Novel)

• The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan (Essay)

• Le voci della sera (English: Voices in the Evening) - Natalia Ginzburg (Novel)

• Tutti i nostri ieri (English: All Our Yesterdays) - Natalia Ginzburg (Novel)

• The Fifties Mystique - Jessica Mann (Memoir)

• Le Bal - Irène Némirovsky (Novella)

• Les chiens et les loups (English: The Dogs and the Wolves)  - Irène Némirovsky (Novel)

• David Golder - Irène Némirovsky (Novel)

• "Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom" - Sylvia Plath (Short Story)

• Spikenard - Yvonne Reddick (Poetry)

• Translating Mountains - Yvonne Reddick (Poetry)

• Songs My Enemy Taught Me - Joelle Taylor (Poetry)

• Tea With Cardamom - Warda Yassin (Poetry)

My 2018 Reading List

(These books haven't necessarily been published in 2018)

• Suite Française - Irène Némirovsky

• In Other Words - Jhumpa Lahiri

• Honour - Elif Shafak

• La Ragazza di Bube (English: Bebo's Girl) - Carlo Cassola

• A Hurry of English - Mary Jean Chan

• The Cloven Viscount - Italo Calvino

• The Periodic Table - Primo Levi

• The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi

• The Republic of Motherhood - Liz Berry

• La main coupée (English: The Bloody Hand) - Blaise Cendrars

• Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi

• Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? - Jeanette Winterson

• The Solitude of Prime Numbers - Paolo Giordano

• The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume II: 1956 – 1963 - Sylvia Plath

• How to be a Poet - Jo Bell, Jane Commane et. al.

• The Perseverance - Raymond Antrobus

A Map of my Poems

Places can act as a guide to understand the genesis of a piece of writing.

Having lived in France (twice), Ireland (twice), the UK (twice) and Italy (once, unfortunately), I firmly believe that my poems have been shaped by the places where they emerged in many ways, even when the actual location is not the subject matter. As Vahni Capildeo writes in her Venus as a Bear, "one place belongs with the poem". This is a list of my published poems and "where they belong":

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THE BASQUE COUNTRY

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• "Tales of the Woodcock"

• "Sotto il Mare"

• "A Modern Watercolour"

• "Shapes from the Past"

• "Etxe"

• "The Basque Witch Hunt, 1610"

• "Krieg"

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SPAIN

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Granada and its surroundings

• "Requiem for Lorca"

• "Soledad Montoya"

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FRANCE

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• "Divine Séraphine"

• "A Zen Rumination"

• "The Fall of the West"

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Paris

• "Only the Unemployed Have Time to Watch the Snow Falling"

• “Pikachu in the Musée d’Orsay”

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Versailles​

• "M.A.: a French Sonnet"

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ENGLAND

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• "A Living Doll"

• "My Cricket Kids"

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London

• "Memento Mori in Highgate Cemetery"

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ITALY

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Bologna

• "Magdalenian"

• "On Cooking Krakens"

• "Humoral Medicine"

• "Bologna"

Florence

• "Best Portrait"

Genoa

• "Sotto il Mare"

Rome

• "Tiresias and Moses"

• "The Via Appia Catacombs"

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Trieste

• "Treasuring Trieste"

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Venice

• "Three Other Ways to Look at Venice"

Verona

• "Juliet's Chest"

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IRELAND

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Bantry

• "Sotto il Mare"

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Dublin

• "Drunken Roses"

• "The Black Butterflies"

• "The Argentinian Rugbywomen"

Howth

• "On Painting an Irish Seaside Resort"

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ARGENTINA

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• "The Wandering Basque"

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Other unpublished poems draw inspiration from Biarritz, Zugarramurdi, the Aquitaine and Occitanie regions, Sevilla, Navarra, Paris, Wiltshire, Somerset, Naples, Perugia, Siena, Ravenna, Dalkey, Belfast, Tokyo, Yokohama, Kyoto, Winchester, Canterbury, Lourdes, Devon...

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