Exophony is the practice of (normally creative) writing in a language that is not one's mother tongue. While the practice is age-old, the term is relatively new: French linguists such as Louis-Jean Calvet discussed "littérature exophone" since 1979, while the German equivalent, Exophonie, was used within the field of literary and cultural studies by Susan Arndt, Dirk Naguschewski and Robert Stockhammer in 2007. In English, Chantal Wright proposed its more widespread use in 2008, wrote a paper on it in 2010, and went on to teach a course at the University of Warwick in 2016/7.

Some exophonic authors may be  bilingual or multilingual from their childhood years, even polyglots, while others may write in an acquired language. In some cases the second language is acquired early in life, for example through immigration, and it is not always clear whether the writer should strictly be classed a non-native speaker. However, by no means all bilingual/multilingual writers are exophonic: for example, J. M. Coetzee has commented that despite being bilingual in English and Afrikaans and having "a fairly wide-ranging acquaintance with Spanish" he has "absolutely no competence as a writer" in that language, and even his "command of English, spoken and written, feels like the kind of command a foreigner might have”. He further says "the versions that my translators produce are in no way inferior to the original” and even "the Spanish translation of 'El Polaco' reflects [my] intentions more clearly than the original English text does", adding that he likes being “read in a language in which I feel myself to be a somewhat more humorous writer than in the original”.

In other cases, the language is acquired through exile or migration: "Exophonic writing, the phenomenon of writing literature in a second language, is increasing across Europe due to labour migration".

It is one form of transnational literature, although the latter also encompasses writing that crosses national stylistic or cultural boundaries without being written in another language. "Extraterritoriality and exophony are indeed important notions, not only for comparative literature but in general for the question of the status of the literary text [of] the 21st century".

It also overlaps with translingualism, and translingualist writer is one of many terms that has been coined to describe the phenomenon. Related concepts in English include transculturalism/transculturation, axial writing, postnationalism and postcolonialism, and in German, Exophonie, Anders-Sprachigkeit, Interkulturelle Literatur ('intercultural literature'), Gastarbeiterliteratur ('guest worker literature'), Ausländerliteratur ('foreigner literature') and Migrantenliteratur ('migrant literature'). In Japanese the term used is 越境文学 (ekkyō-bungaku, lit. border-crossing literature). The scholar Yuri Kumagai wrote that it "is said to shatter the myth of unique difficulty of Japanese, and bring new perspectives and creative power into the language", and that it can challenge "categories that mark what/who is inside and outside".

Motivations for becoming an exophonic writer may be manifold: to make a political statement (for example, Yoko Tawada attempted "to produce exophony both in her mother tongue [Japanese] and her acquired tongue [German] ... to dismantle ... the ultranationalistic concept of a 'beautiful' Japanese language"), to adopt/avoid stylistic elements of particular languages ("for Tawada, a native speaker of a language whose grammar makes no distinctions of gender, case, definite and indefinite articles, or singular and plural ... each Western word, phrase or idiom becomes a conundrum", "I grope for some unlikely expression in my native language, trying to find the proper equivalence in translation for an English word or phrase"), to evade the risk of being lost in translation, or to gain a wider readership – translated literature in the UK and US accounts for only a small percentage of sales, so "it makes commercial sense". When asked why he didn’t write in his native language, Joseph Conrad replied, "I value too much our beautiful Polish literature to introduce into it my worthless twaddle. But for Englishmen my capacities are just sufficient." It may defy definition: when Chika Unigwe was asked whether her writing felt Belgian or Nigerian, she said it "depended on the time of day ... some stories needed to be written in English, whereas others could only be told in Dutch". Argentinian podcaster and author Zoe Gomez Cass has commented that in addition to the reasons above, she writes in English because she doesn't know "which Spanish" to write in, the number of variants and lack of standardization conversely making her mother tongue a harder choice.

Some exophonic authors are also translators, including (in some cases) of their own works. The phenomenon of translating into a second language - including non-literary works - is generally referred to as "L2 translation", and there was once "strong resistance to it on the grounds of it being perceived as unprofessional and inherently deficient […] although the academic dispute about [its] validity seems decidedly milder now".

Conversely, translation of exophonic works can present problems due to the "defamiliarisation of the new language through stylistic innovation".

Recognition
Many exophonic authors have won recognition for their writing via top literary awards, as well as a variety of national honours and distinctions. The :fr:Prix Rivarol was specifically awarded to novels in French by 'non-first language' authors, as was the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize for non-native German works. Even awards that have been historically limited to native speakers for decades, such as the Akutagawa Prize, have now begun to be awarded to non-natives and even non-nationals.

Some examples (by no means exhaustive):

 Chinua Achebe: Man Booker International Prize
 Gloria Alcorta: :fr:Prix Rivarol
 Samuel Beckett: Prix Formentor, Nobel Prize
 Joseph Brodsky: Nobel Prize
 Emil Cioran: :fr:Prix Rivarol
 Adolfo Costa du Rels: Gulbenkian Prize, :fr:Prix Rivarol
 Kazuo Ishiguro: Whitbread Prize, Booker Prize, Nobel Prize; OBE, Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Order of the Rising Sun, Knight Bachelor
 Vahé Katcha: :fr:Prix Rivarol
 Ágota Kristóf: ADELF Prix Europe, Gottfried Keller Preis, Austrian State Prize for European Literature
 Milan Kundera: Prix Médicis, Mondello Prize, Herder Prize, Jerusalem Prize, Ovid Prize
 :fr:Bruce Lowery: :fr:Prix Rivarol
 Amin Maalouf: Prix Goncourt, Prix Méditerranée, Prince of Asturias Award, Sheikh Zayed Book Award; elected to Académie française, National Order of Merit, Royal Society of Literature
 Yann Martel: Man Booker Prize, Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, etc.
 Melinda Nadj Abonji: German Book Prize, Swiss Book Prize
 :fr:Piotr Rawicz: :fr:Prix Rivarol
 Emine Sevgi Özdamar: Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, etc.
 Shahan Shahnour (as Armen Lubin): :fr:Prix Rivarol
 Saša Stanišić: Alfred Döblin Prize, German Book Prize
 Tom Stoppard: Academy Award, British Academy Film Award, Golden Globe Award; CBE, etc.
 Yoko Tawada: Akutagawa Prize (for a work in Japanese, not exophonic), Goethe Medal, Kleist Prize
 Chika Unigwe: Nigeria Prize for Literature
 Elie Wiesel: :fr:Prix Rivarol, Prix Médicis, Nobel Peace Prize
 Yang Yi: Akutagawa Prize
 David Zoppetti: :ja:すばる文学賞

See also
List of exophonic writers
Second language writing

References

Further reading
Substantial reading list from Chantal Wright's course on Exophony at Warwick University
Exophony and the Locations of (Cultural) Identity in Levy Hideo's Fiction , Faye Yuan Kleeman, retrieved 28 February 2017
The unprepared future of an exophonic refugee, Al Filreis, retrieved 28 February 2017
Voluntary Exile, Michael F. Moore, retrieved 28 February 2017
The Fall of Language in the Age of English, Elisa Taber's review in Asymptote of Minae Mizumura's book, retrieved 28 February 2017
Dan Vyleta's top 10 books in second languages, Dan Vyleta in The Guardian, retrieved 28 February 2017
Why writing in English was a good career move for Nabokov, Conrad – and now Chirovici, Toby Lichtig in The Daily Telegraph, retrieved 28 February 2017

External links
 Litehouse, a platform "to highlight and promote literature and poetry from exophonic writers"
 Talk on "Exophonic Literary L2 Translators and their Relationship to Language" by Lúcia Collischonn (University of Warwick) at Trinity Centre for Literary & Cultural Translation
 "The Exophonic Writer" podcast

 
Literature by language