The author of Liefdesverklaring aan de Nederlandse taal (Love declaration to the Dutch language), Mira Feticu spent 15 years learning the mother tongue of her adoptive country. The book is a dedication to the joys and strife of mastering another language; how becoming immersed in a foreign culture and dialect not only shifted her mode of communication but also her way of looking at the world. In her native Romania, Mira worked as a radio producer and publicist. She was one of the first to recognise – and one of very few to interview – the immense talent of Herta Müller at a time when hardly anyone was interested in the future Nobel Prize winner. Taking a savvy, pensive and oftentimes uncanny approach to writing, Mira pens novels on subjects such as a doomed search for a stolen Picasso painting or a literature professor’s reconciliation with a troubled past. In Extra Extra no. 19, find her erotic short story – a letter of longing addressed to Calpurnia from Ovid.