Dare To Be

Margaret Koudriaev (LGB, 2018) may only be 21 years old, but she is already a published poet! Some alumni may recognise her name from when she swam across the English Channel at age 16 during her time at Ecolint. Now a photography student at the Parsons School of Design in New York City, Margaret recently made her editorial debut with Dare to be, a collection of autobiographical coming-of-age poems illustrated by her photography.

She explains that when the lockdown happened, she came back to Geneva and started to feel fidgety with boredom and a bit overwhelmed with a mix of emotions. Instead of indulging in Netflix binges like the rest of us, Margaret started to write poems to express her emotions and as a process of introspection. She has always been a great admirer of poetry, but writing has never been an easy task for her since she is dyslexic and more of a visual artist. To her surprise, what was initially a description of her photos took on a very lyrical style and quickly became poems. 

By the end of the lockdown, she had 20 poems that could be organised in chapters and the book started to take shape. Being a perfectionist, she re-took all the pictures and, at the end of the process, had 52 poems illustrated by her photos, one for every week in a year. The result is a combination of her visual skills and for the first time her writing abilities. It was also for her a “coming of age” experience, a personal quest to find herself but a feeling shared by many people who will be touched by her book.

The editorial process was yet another challenge and she was turned down by several publishing houses. Never deterred, she found a self-publishing company and crowd-funded to be able to share her book with the world. The result is a beautiful book available on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble. Margaret is not one to rest on her laurels and she is already working on her second book, all while working towards earning her degree in May 2022. 

We can understand why Margaret says that she has found her place in New York, the city that never sleeps.