Author, Explorer, Forest Bathing Guide & Forest Therapy Practitioner 

Hi and welcome to my nature-themed website. I am Diana Radovan and the author of the hybrid kaleidoscopic memoir Our Voices (Matador, 2022). Romanian-born and raised in oppressive communism, I've also lived in Canada and currently reside in Germany (in the heart of Upper Bavaria, close to the Alps and the Austrian border) but I see myself as a world citizen. I'm an explorer and an avid hiker. To express myself, I use fiction, nonfiction, poetry, imagery, and my voice. In my creative writing craft, teaching, and coaching, I am deeply interested in the rewilding of language and the shapes of human narratives in this particular time in our planet's evolution.

 

I’m an alum of creative writing classes and programmes offered by Granta/Professional Wring Academy - Nature Writing, Mornin’ Poets, Corporeal Writing, Beyond Form Creative Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Sarah Selecky Writing School, Iceland Writers Retreat, AWP, Banff Centre for the Arts, and U of C Cont Ed Creative Writing, among others. My creative writing has been published internationally since 2004 (in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, and Romania). My literary achievements to date include a Best of the Net Award nomination and being long-listed for the Disquiet International Literary Prize and for LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction (top 50 short stories in the competition). My first publication was in Romanian, 2 prose poems that won a mention in the annual Pavel Dan contest. Currently, I'm active in the following writing groups: Happy Writing, Shut Up and Write Munich, Memoir Mentors, Women Who Submit Europe, and Die Rosenheimer Autoren. 

 

Nature, science, the environment, planetary health, and policy making have always been my passions in addition to writing, photography, visual art, theatre, and music. I have a PhD in the natural sciences (Dr. rer. nat.) from TU Dortmund/IMPRS-LM (International Max Planck Research School for Living Matter) Dortmund and I'm a BELS-certified Editor in the Life Sciences. I'm also am alum of Banff Science Communications, an immersive residency programme in the heart of Banff National Park, led by Jay Ingram, and meant to teach tools for communicating science to a lay audience through creative means. Moreover, I completed the Writing in the Sciences class offered by Stanford University with distinction. I hold medical writing certificates (advanced and foundation levels) from the European Medical Writers Association (EMWA), where I was a committee member for the Pharmacovigilance Special Interest Group and co-hosted a webinar on the environmental risk assessment of medicinal products. I've recently pursued classes on the economy and sociology of public policy (OP Jindal Global University) and on public health (Imperial College London).

 

Currently, I work in the field of sustainability and I am pursuing a dual certification with the Forest Therapy Hub, as Forest Bathing Guide and Forest Therapy Practitioner. In addition, I am training as an Art Life Coach. In the last 10 years, I taught creative writing and coached writers at Sarah Selecky Writing School, Creative Writing in Munich (as group founder and main workshop leader), Happy Writing, Beyond Form Creative Writing, Arcana, PLAI Festival, Fața Cărții, and elsewhere. I also taught medical writing to both cross-functional audiences and medical writers at EMWA conferences. My experience as a literary citizen also includes reading and editing short stories for Flash Fiction Magazine as well as curating and editing the writing section of Arcana 2020, a virtual project involving over 40 creative writers and visual artists from around the globe.

 

Find out more about my writing here.