Conversation: Invisible languages & text editing

Marina Skalova is a writer and literary translator from Russia and Germany. She is the author of six books, published by Héros-Limite, les Lisières, l'Arche and le Seuil, which fall somewhere between poetry, theater and essays. Her work has been translated in several countries, notably South America, and performed on various European stages. Her next book, Le corps cille, a trilingual book of poetry, will be published by Héros-Limite in 2025. For her, literary translation is a physical, organic practice. In poetry, she has translated, prefaced and composed the anthology Tu es l'avenir by Galina Rymbu (Vanloo, 2023), Verdicts by Lida Youssoupova for éditions zoème (2023) and Parti sans laisser d'adresse by Levin Westermann for Cheyne (2025).

Chloé Billon is a literary translator and conference interpreter. After studying English and German literature, she pursued a degree in Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian at Inalco, completing a Master's in literary translation. She also holds a diploma in conference interpreting from ESIT and was part of the 2016–2018 cohort at the French National Book Center's Literary Translation School (ETL). She received the 2020 Inalco–VO/VF Translation Prize for Turbines du Titanic by Robert Perišić, and the 2023 Grand Translation Prize of the City of Arles for The Fox by Dubravka Ugrešić. Her translation of Adios Cowboy by Olja Savičević won the 2020 First Foreign Novel Prize. She mainly translates from Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian, as well as from German and English. She has translated several contemporary authors from the Balkans.

Born in 1975 in Foligno, Italy, Isabella Checcaglini moved to Paris in 1994. While completing her doctoral thesis on the work of Mallarmé at Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis, she founded Ypsilon Éditeur as a way to pursue literary research through other means.

Author of an essay on the Twin Peaks series, critic, moderator of literary meetings and scientific collaborator at ULiège, Louise Van Brabant wanders through books, films and forests - she writes about all three.