Lost Lingual: Dinara Rasuleva in conversation with Hendrikje Dorussen

Translator Dinara Rasuleva joins Hendrikje Dorussen to discuss Lost Lingual, reflecting on language, translation, identity, and cultural memory. The conversation will explore how voices and histories travel across languages, and how translation can open up new ways of thinking about belonging, expression, and linguistic experience.

Dinara Rasuleva is a writer and poet_ess based in Berlin and born in Kazan, Tatarstan. Master’s in Linguistics, Nizhni Novgorod State Linguistic University, 2009. Dinara writes in Tatar, Russian, English and German — languages she uses everyday. Dinara’s poetry was described and analysed as decolonial and feminist writing, as expressionist poetry and performance poetry. In 2020 Dinara started a feminist writing laboratory for russian-speaking immigrant FLINTA community. In 2020, she co-founded the musical art collective TATAR KYZ:LAR, whose debut multilingual album AŞ was released in 2025 in the form of a computer game. In 2022 Dinara started the Lostlingual project, an investigation of the loss of her native Tatar language through translingual abstract poetry. In 2023 in collaboration with Berlin library Totschka Dinara started TEL:L laboratories: writing in native forgotten or stolen languages. Published books: Su : voda (s tatarskogo)/Су : вода (с татарского), book of poetry, 2022, Babel bookstore publishing house; Traumagotchi/Травмагочи, a novel, 2025, shell(f); and, Lostlingual, essay and multilingual poems, 2025, Rab-Rab Press.

Hendrikje Dorussen is a DPhil student in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford, St Anne’s college, and previously undertook her BA and MPhil at the University of Cambridge. Her research focusses on the representation of language endangerment in contemporary literature and cultural production and is funded by the Rupert Murdoch studentship. Her research interests include translation, indigeneity, visual culture, and decolonial linguistics. Alongside her research, she is also an editorial board member of the OCCT Review.