My name is Karina Lickorish Quinn and I am a novelist and a lecturer in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway University of London. I am Peruvian and British and I grew up bilingual. One of my early memories of school is being asked to write a diary entry about my weekend and writing some Spanish words in my piece. I remember my work coming back with thick red pen crossing out and mistranslating my Spanish words and how angry and misunderstood I felt. Since then, I have believed multilingual children should have the opportunity to bring their language skills to their writing in the school classroom.

In January to April 2023, I arranged for three professional multilingual writers to conduct multilingual creative writing workshops with a class of children at a South London Primary School. The children worked with the poets Leo Boix and Ankita Saxena, and the rapper Mr Breis. Through these workshops, the children explored how to write poems in two or more languages in one text; how to rhyme across languages; how to write a multilingual poem in ways that accommodate a monolingual reader; and how to write about memories and experiences that reflect our heritage like migration, food, clothing and family celebrations.

To explore the impact of the workshops on the children’s learning, I conducted interviews with the children, parents and with their classroom teacher. I also kept copies of the children’s work to analyse the new writing skills they were developing through writing in two or more languages at once.