In 2015 I spent a month in residence at Arteles Creative Center in Finland. During that time I worked on a series of poems based on recognisably similar words from the related Finno-Ugric languages of Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian.

About 200 words can still be identified, most of them relating to body parts, food, and family relationships. Several structural similarities also persist in these languages (including vowel harmony), though many elements have been diluted by migration and settlement during the 4 000 years since these words were last shared in one place, which is believed to be somewhere near the Ural Mountains in Western Russia. I was also very influenced by the Finnish epic, the Kalevala, in the process of writing these poems.

Since the residency, my poem Persistence in Three Languages was awarded first place in the Society of Women Writers NSW Poetry Prize 2017, and Local Bus from Tampere to Helsinki published in foam:e Issue 15.