Noellyn Chloe Fraser is the pen-name of a twenty-something Swiss writer who still waits for her life to begin.

Besides writing and reading, I create cocktails for my friends and myself, inspired by books (honorable mentions: Yellowface by R. F. Kuang and This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone), and document them meticulously. I go to mostly metalcore concerts, I try all sorts of hopefully vegetarian food and I climb plastic rocks. I watch cooking shows and only rarely commit to a more suspenseful watch. Together with my fiancé I take care of a black cat with hypertension and a blind eye, and I like to claim that I play the piano, despite it gathering dust in the corner.

As an avid reader during my childhood, I stopped reading for fun during my university years. Everyone knows the story. Of course I wanted to be an author when I was fourteen and started assembling a wacky story about a zombie-apocalypse from the viewpoint of a teenage girl in a psych ward. No plotting, just vibes. Oh, and I posted it on facebook.

Eventually I found myself in a dull academic environment and I turned to writing as an outlet for built-up creativity; from song lyrics and poetry, short stories and memoirs, to more fleshed-out fiction; bits of everything.

You might wonder why I use a pen-name. Or maybe you don’t but I am going to explain it anyway. It is mostly because I want my academic work and my other written projects to be clearly separated. And only maybe a tiny little bit because I am a coward.

My—Noellyn’s—short memoir titled “The Sailor and the Siren” has been long-listed by Fish Publishing for the Fish Short Memoir Prize.