The Lost & Found literary map of London is an interactive online resource developed by the UCL European Institute that documents the interactions of European writers with the city. Since its inception as a Covid-era passion project, the map has expanded to include nearly 100 extracts in 26 European languages pinned to locations from Belgravia to the East End. 

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At the event on 14 May, the UCL European Institute, in collaboration with the European Literature Network, EUNIC London and the European Parliament Liaison Office in the UK, invited writers to contribute to Lost & Found and to reflect on London as a destination where people, language, and culture meet and are transformed.

I was fascinated to listen to the 2025 Writer in Residence, Ciara Broderick from Ireland, alongside her three shortlisted colleagues, Nisrine Mbarki from the Netherlands, Domas Raibys from Lithuania and Iryna Shuvalova from Ukraine. In a discussion hosted by journalist and presenter Rosie Goldsmith, the four writers shared extracts of their work and reflected on what London meant to them. This post aims to give some insight into their different lives, writing, and connections to the European Literary Map of London.

(left to right: Ciara Broderick, Nisrine Mbarki, Domas Raibys, Iryna Shuvalova. Photo credit: https://london.europarl.europa.eu/en/events/mapping)

Ciara Broderick 

From the European country that “many people forget is actually in Europe” (her words), Ciara has focused on the lived experience of Irish immigrants in London. During her time as the 2025 Writer in Residence, she says, she is producing a short story in Gaelic inspired by her mother’s experience coming to London in the 1980s on a bus, her first time outside Ireland and away from the constant observation at home. She would like to contribute the first entry in the Irish language on the literary map. Like so many in Ireland, Ciara is not a native speaker of Gaelic, but she enjoys translating her work into Irish to do her part in reviving the language. 

As part of her research, Ciara is spending her days wandering around London, visiting museums and meeting various personalities. She tells us about how an issue with her mobile roaming forced herto engage analogously and led to an unforgettable conversation with an antique seller from Hong Kong – a stark reminder that taking our eyes off our phones means we can better experience the world!

For the literary map, Ciara would like to contribute the first entry in the Irish language. Like many others, the Irish writer is not a native speaker of Gaelic, but she enjoys translating her work into Irish to do her part in reviving the language. 

Here’s the beginning and the end of the moving story that Ciara reads out during the event (full story in issue 3 of the Ragaire journal).

Rain
by Ciara Broderick

A young woman sets out on a journey. It’s a dark late-afternoon in September and the air is damp and cool with the smell of rain on tarmac. Above her, the sky is the broiling bruise black of her father’s car. But to the east, over the fields and bog and heads of fir trees, it’s a hopeful shade lighter. A breeze stirs her hair, strokes tenderly her bare shoulder and she shivers. Her chest is swollen with anxious excitement. There’s a jittering deep in her stomach.
This morning, the young woman (a girl, really – let’s call her a girl) dressed her little sister for school; all whispered arguments over hair brushing and a silent slipping on of shoes so as not to wake their father sleeping on the couch. The girl kissed her fingers and pressed them to her mother’s faded memorial card, tucked into the frame of the Sacred Heart. She walked her sister to school in the village, then continued on to town, where she took a coach to two towns over. It let her off outside the Credit Union. The girl walked again, until buildings gave way to stone walls and hedgerows. Until her feet began to hurt in her cheap new shoes, and fat, cold drops began landing on her goose-fleshed arms, and a woman and her husband pulled over and asked the girl if she wanted a lift.
In the car, the girl placed silent bets on raindrops racing down the window and avoided the anxious eyes of the woman in the rearview mirror. “Runaway” by Bon Jovi played on the radio. The girl said “I love this song” and smiled softly to herself. She rolled down the window and raised her nose to the fresh air, because she was carsick and the husband smelt like her front room.
Then the woman pulled over at the side of the road and asked “are you sure you know where you’re going, pet?” and the girl said “Yes” and “Thank you.” The girl got out and the woman drove away. So now the girl is here; at a crossroads in a townland she doesn’t know, on the last stretch of her journey.

[…]

Now the woman in the car, she’s different. She’ll spend her life, now and then, remembering the girl’s face in the rear view mirror and feeling a twist of guilt for all the things she should have said. She’ll wonder what became of the girl, hoping she’s all right; trying to wrench herself free from under the weight of the dread she felt that day watching the girl’s hopeful smile as Bon Jovi played on the radio. The woman, in a rare show of self kindness, will remind herself that at the time she was swollen with her sixth child, breathing through the bruises her husband had left on her ribs. She will think, fuck it, you can’t be saving everyone. Surely there were parents out there looking. So we can forgive the woman, maybe, can we?
But it took three days for the girl’s father to become hungry enough to realise that there’d been no dinner handed up to him for a while. He called for the girl and instead her sister answered, saying “I haven’t seen her since Tuesday.” So, in need of a dinner, her father pulled his vest down over a wiry slab of belly and drove around to the houses of friends the girl hadn’t had since she was eight to ask if anyone’d seen her. In the backseat of the car, the girl’s sister held the birthday card she’d made for the girl, but hadn’t yet been able to give her, because the day the girl left was her birthday. The sister stroked the edge of the card, believing as hard as she could that if she just kept it with her, the girl would emerge from behind the disapproving parents in the doorways of the houses they visited and be sorry for being gone so long. On the front the card said “14 TODAY”, on the inside “I LOVE YOO MIRIAM”.
But you know all that, don’t you?
And, years from now, when the sister is grown, she will drive her own children through the townland where Miriam concluded her journey. She will pass the fields and round the bend, go by the farmhouse and turn, completely accidentally, right. Then, realising she is lost, she will pull over at the first house she comes to and ask the old man in the garden for directions. She will admire the ash tree in His garden, take in the evidence of His bachelor life and the stoop of His shoulders over the shovel and think, how sad that this gentle old man lives alone. She will drive away, never knowing.
But you know, don’t you? You’ve always known.

Nisrine Mbarki

The writer from Amsterdam is fluent in five languages, all of which she uses in her work. As I listen to Nisrine reciting her poems, she flows seemingly effortlessly between Dutch, Arabic, Tamazight, French and English – and I wonder about how only a few people on this planet might be able to fully understand all of her work. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Nisrine is also a professional translator, although she never studied translation. She criticises what she deems an “oriental lens” in translating non-European languages, and shared with us her plans to complete a PhD in ‘new translation studies’, the intersection of decolonial translation theory and sociocultural linguistics.

Decolonial themes run throughout Nisrine’s work: Her upcoming novel Boiling Point looks at the lives of ordinary people in Brussels, Algiers, Marrakesh, Amsterdam and London during the independence movements of North African, Arab and Asian countries in 1955-1963 – she calls this “the story of Europe from another perspective”. 

Besides writing, Nisrine is an avid collector of ambient audio extracts. For years she has been recording clips from the bus, tube, street, or pub; although she has no plan of what to do with them.

For Nisrine, London is a city of change and multiculturalism. Each visit here has changed her life in some way, and London is how she—the multilingual child of immigrants and a person of colour—would imagine a city where anybody can feel at home. 

You can find a translated version of Nisrine’s poem ‘Tongue’ here.

Domas Raibys

Domas introduces himself as a train engineer, jogging enthusiast and poet. Later it becomes clear he’s also a playwright and a comedian. The Lithuanian tells us about the time he applied for a job using his entire life story as a cover letter. Somewhere along the way, Domas apparently wrote a play and ran a marathon in wooden clogs to advertise it – but then forgot to mention it in his news interview.

Like Domas, I’m afraid that my memory is sometimes less than perfect and I’ve forgotten the rest of his life story. However, I do remember that at one point the entire audience at Europe House was laughing tremendously when Domas read out a “famous Lithuanian joke”, but it later turned out to be a boring children’s fable (according to him). So the joke was really on us…

Domas was attracted to London because his partner studied here and his work takes great inspiration from British comedian Stewart Lee. The shortlisted writer wants to contribute the first Lithuanian-language entry to the Literary Map. What form that may take — poetry, a play, or a comedic piece — remains to be seen.

See a collection of Domas’ work here (in Lithuanian). 

Iryna Shuvalova

Iryna, originally from Kyiv, has been living on the move for the past few years. One recent highlight was a month she spent living in a Buddhist temple in Taiwan. Although many of Iryna’s poems centre on her experience of living in exile following the Russian full-scale invasion, the writer believes Ukrainian literature should not be defined by war. Life does not cease during war: human experiences like falling in love and fighting with parents continue, and stories cannot only be about sadness.

Iryna describes her relationship with London as “complicated”, marred by the headaches she got every time she came here during her PhD in Cambridge. But Iryna does not shy away from complicated themes, writing about the multifaceted experiences of war and having chosen to spend significant time in Nanjing, China, another “complicated” place.

For the Literary Map, Iryna would like to create a collection of poems reflecting her mother’s arrival in London in April 2022 after the invasion. She wants to see more ordinary, working-class voices represented to contrast the many classic authors who came from more privileged European elite backgrounds.

Beyond writing, Iryna is also a professor of politics and society. This position has made her think about what it means to be European. She tells Europe is made by its people, so we can and should decide what we want Europe to represent – food for thought to end an enlightening evening.

Iryna’s poem ‘a moving grove’ can be found here.

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Ben Rettinger is currently in his second year pursuing a BA in European Social and Political Studies student, specializing in International Relations and Spanish. He is also a Student Ambassador of the UCL European Institute and particularly interested in the EU’s external relations and how EU policies influence positive change across the world.

Note: The views expressed in this post are those of the author, and not of the UCL European Institute, nor of UCL.