Mariolina Koller-Fanconi

BIOGRAPHY
Mariolina Koller-Fanconi (born 1933 in Milano/Italy of an Italian mother and a Swiss father) is a bilingual writer (German and Italian) and has now started to write in English. She is also fluent in French. She is a member of AdS, the Swiss Writers’ Association.

Mariolina has given numerous readings and held lectures in Switzerland. She organized monthly literary sessions to promote unknown writers and carried out practical “quick workshops” for writing beginners. In the eighties she set up a small company in Switzerland to edit and publish books written by women, which she managed and financed herself. Due to her move to Canada, this company is no longer active.

She has been published in several Swiss and Italian newspapers, literary and cultural magazines as well as in anthologies. The English translation of her fictional biography of Eleonora d’Arborea, a Sardinian noblewoman of the Middle Ages, was launched in Halifax in February 2008. Since then she has written a “baroque” short story in German, Krise in Medirocca, a collection of Animal Stories for Young and Old in English, as well as detailed travel reports in English about her trips to Malta, Israel and the city of Trieste.

Her next project is the “life story” of a many centuries old house in the Swiss Alps.

Her main interests are Female Issues, World history and History of Religions.


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Recommended Experience Levels

The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS) recommends that each workshop’s participants share a level or range of writing / publication experience. This is to ensure that each participant gets value from the workshop⁠ and is presented with information, strategies, and skills that suit their current writing priorities.

To this end, the “Recommended experience level” section of each workshop description refers to the following definitions developed by WFNS:

  • New writers: those with no professional publications (yet!) or a few short professional publications (i.e., poems, stories, or essays in literary magazines, journals, anthologies, or chapbooks).
  • Emerging writers: those with numerous professional publications and/or one book-length publication.
  • Established writers/authors: those with two book-length publications or the equivalent in book-length and short publications.
  • Professional authors: those with more than two book-length publications.

For “intensive” and “masterclass” creative writing workshops, which provide more opportunities for participant-to-participant feedback, the recommended experience level should be followed.

For all other workshops, the recommended experience level is just that—a recommendation—and we encourage potential participants to follow their own judgment when registering.

If you’re uncertain of your experience level with regard to any particular workshop, please feel free to contact us at communications@writers.ns.ca