Sophia Kornienko is a Russian radio journalist, writer and translator living in Amsterdam, on a canal. Not one of the four famous ones, but still a nice one. The truth is, she does not do well when there is no water nearby. Maybe because her beloved grandfather was a marine captain and she was born by the sea, in the most Western possible part of the Soviet empire, in a cobbled town called Tallinn, over quarter of a century ago. It was there that she first got intrigued by the contrast of alphabets and aesthetics. Little Sophia's Russian family, perhaps also disturbed by that contrast, decided to move to Russia. Her next hometown, the most Western one could get within what was left of the empire, had a glamorous façade and an inside so endlessly dark and deep as its infamous back yards, also called "wells". And again, it had all the water one may ask for to reflect both on the past and the future. St.Petersburg itself was meant as a reflection of an older European seaport, but Sophia did not know it then. She studied like mad to get into the faculty of linguistics, because it was so beautifully located on the Neva river and it was enough to throw one piece of bread in the air to become surrounded by white seagulls. Studying was easy thanks to some heavy travelling pursued since the age of 11 out of rebellion, romance and pure escapism. She had mimicked American pronunciation and wondered how come American children had the same fingers and fingernails as herself.

Fluent Spanish, rips of Croatian and Italian, and rather good Danish, doomed to become subdued by another Germanic language later in life. She did not know it then. When she was 15, a little boy she was babysitting told her: you love to be challenged, don't you? And she knew that her university diploma in English and simultaneous interpreting suggested too much non-existence, too much absence, even if well paid. They all paid well - the Danish government, the Indian embassy, the American paper mill… But then they made her feel like one of those drops that falls in the water and does not even leave circles. There has always been some unknown mechanism making her relapse to journalism. Even after she had made up her mind to give up her job in The St.Petersburg Times and follow her heart to Amsterdam, where she decided to study film, another lucky relapse occurred and her childish voice was allowed at a radio station she had always considered legendary.

She hopes this latest relapse is irreversible. Watching the world blink by, she sees text and sound fuse into one medium, herself metamorphosing into what may be called a multimedia storyteller.