EXOPHONIES | My brain thinks in English by Francesca Tacchi

Postcards, fridge magnets, t-shirts and tote bags… these are the things most people would buy as souvenirs during a trip.
I, for most of my adolescence, would instead buy books.
Amazon wasn’t really a thing back then, so the only way I could get my hands on the books I wanted was to scavenge international bookshops. I’d be in Wien, or Prague, during the summer family vacation, searching for the biggest bookshop I could find. There, I’d go straight to the English aisle, and fill my backpack with books. Mostly Terry Pratchett’s works, out of necessity: they weren’t translated into Italian, and in a pre-kindle era, scavenging international bookshops was the only way to keep reading my favorite author.
This is to say that, before being an exophone writer, I was an exophone reader. I read books in a language different than mine because it was the only way I could keep up with my favorite authors, and avoid the—at the time—pretty awful translations of what little fantasy books made it to Italy. And while reading English books, I absorbed all the tropes and tricks of anglophone literature, so often lost in translation. I was taught English grammar in school, of course. Irregular verbs and tenses and all that. But when it comes to writing—to the act of putting words together in order to create images and worlds and characters—my primary teachers were books.
It’s no wonder, then, that my creative brain started working in English.

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