Literature can be born from introspection or observation, from personal memory or from collective narrative. Both fiction and non-fiction can turn memory and trauma into narrative substance and show how individual stories often become the mirror of shared realities. Writing across borders – geographical and linguistic, but also personal and emotional – is often a fertile path toward rethinking the past and reflecting on the present with a renewed perspective.

This session brings together the Bulgarian author Kapka Kassabova, who in non-fiction books like Border (Granta, 2017) combines travelogue, personal memoir, and anthropology to explore the borders between Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece, with Corina Oproae, a Catalan poet and storyteller of Romanian origin, who in La casa limón [The Lemon House] (Tusquets Editors Prize 2024) novelizes her childhood in Romania under Ceaușescu, demonstrating how writing can be transformative. Two authors who have left behind their mother tongues – Kassabova writes in English and Oproae in Catalan and Spanish – to build new literary realities for themselves. The conversation, moderated by the journalist and coordinator of ARA Llegim, Jordi Nopca, will explore the paths offered by fiction and non-fiction for telling our own stories.