Aura Sevón

At the Saari Residence I will be working on a manuscript for a novel about love and sexuality in the age of modern technologies. I will also translate French feminist philosophy into Finnish and put the finishing touches to my doctoral thesis on the works of multilingual and cross-cultural female authors.

As an author, translator and researcher, I am interested in encounters between different languages and cultures, the intersections of different genres, and the points of common reference between creative writing, translation, philosophy and theory. I study the friction surfaces between gender, sexuality, emotions, affects, technology and nature and experiment with combining different materials, including seemingly incompatible ones. What my literary and research work have in common are transitions and bridge building between various trends, aesthetics and traditions of thought.

Above all, I expect the encounters with international artists at the residence to produce delightful synergies that motivate and inspire us collectively.

Aura Sevón is an author, a literary translator specialising in French feminist literature and a literary and gender studies researcher. Her co-translation (2013) of Hélène Cixous’ Le Rire de la Méduse et autres ironies was nominated for the 2014 J. A. Hollo Award for non-fiction. Her multidisciplinary children’s book of cultural history, Aika metka retki (2013), was selected as one of the most beautiful books of the year by the Finnish Book Art Committee. Sevón’s experimental collage-essay-novel Okulovulva (2021) explores the so-called female gaze through literary means. She is in the process of finishing her trilingual doctoral thesis under a joint supervision agreement between the University of Turku’s Department of Comparative Literature and the Gender Studies programme at Université Paris 8.