Sofie Verraest

Born in Kortrijk/Belgium in 1986.

Sofie Verraest is a writer teaching literature, creative writing and urban and architectural theory at Ghent University and the Royal Arts Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent/Belgium. She was selected as a fellow of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for Creative Writing (2018) and of Akademie Schloss Solitude (2020) and pre-selected for the Iowa International Writing Program (2020) for her English language fiction. She is one of the »New Voices in International Writing« in Ninth Letter (2019, ed. Philip Graham). Other writing features in Fiction Writers Review, Green Mountains Review, Deus Ex Machina, and elsewhere.

She holds a PhD in literary studies from Ghent University. She curates and moderates multilingual literary events, for Passa Porta, Belgium’s International House of Literature in Brussels/Belgium, and Snug Harbor, a Brussels-based series of multilingual events she founded in 2018, among others. In the same year, she collaborated with Sulaiman Addonia to teach creative writing at the Creative Writing Academy for Refugees and Asylum Seekers.

Her interests include very short prose, the problematic concept of a mother tongue, exophony and multi-/translingual writing, American literature, narratives in architecture and urban planning and the city in fiction.

She studied Dutch and French literature and linguistics at the universities of Ghent and Aix-Marseille/France (2004–2007) and obtained an MA in comparative modern literature from Ghent University in 2008, graduating summa cum laude. She went on to specialize in philosophy, completing an MA in the subject at Sofia University/Bulgaria (2008–2009) with a scholarship awarded by the Flemish Community. She was involved in a doctoral research project funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders on the subject of narrative techniques in urban design and the imagination of good places.