My passion for languages and literature goes back as long as I can remember. As soon as I learned my ABC at the age of five, I started reading like my life depended on it. In school, I raced through the reading levels and in the local library they were soon forced to point me towards the adult fiction section to satisfy my constant hunger for reading. It meant saying goodbye to Astrid Lindgren and Jules Vernes, but with Dickens, Turgenev and Dostoevsky I discovered new, different worlds.

All this reading proved very useful. Spelling and style were a breeze, and I soaked up every new language I came across. I left secondary school with a prize for German (a book!) and the ambition to study the languages of my literary heroes.

In 2001 I graduated with great distinction from my course in Translation Studies English-Russian in the department of Applied Linguistics at the Mercator Hogeschool, which is now a department of Ghent University. I received a prize for Russian (a large pile of books!) and left university full of ambition to serve my beloved hometown Ghent and – of course – literature in general with my pen.

After a few jobs and a brief period as a freelance translator and copywriter, I started working for the City of Ghent with great zeal. In the first few years, I collected all sorts of data for Gentinfo about Ghent and the city services in clearly structured information sheets.

With a wealth of knowledge about my city, I moved to the newly created Communication Department in 2012, where I worked as a copywriter for the next six years and produced long and short copy for offline and online channels. In my function as proofreader and senior editor I also clamped down on ‘council speak’, straightened out crooked sentences and had absolutely no mercy for jargon.

All this time, literature stayed at the back of my mind. In 2013 I decided to also pursue this ambition and earn half of my daily bread as a literary translator. I was hungry for more and five years later, I decided to start freelancing full-time. Since then I spend most of my time as a literary translator, editor and proofreader, following the passion that the five year old me found all those years ago.