Dimana Radoeva by Seb Furtado (@seb.furado)
Dimana Radoeva, a recent Concordia fine arts graduate (INDI program), has earned the Susan Jeanne Briscoe Fellowship Award — a $35,000 prize supporting her experimental game that fuses medieval myth with digital poetry.
Established in memory of the late writer and artist Susan Jeanne Briscoe, this fellowship is awarded competitively based on academic merit to recent Concordia graduates who have completed an MA, MFA or PhD and whose creative practice focuses on writing.
Eligible programs include Studio Arts, the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Creative Writing, Humanities PhD and Individualized Programs (INDI).
Radoeva, an interdisciplinary writer and game designer, will use this bursary to continue developing her innovative interactive fiction project, YOU WILL NOT WIN AND YOU MUST DIE, YOU CHURL.
“I am incredibly excited and grateful for the opportunity to continue working on my experimental interactive fiction project, thanks to the Susan Jeanne Briscoe Fellowship,” says Radoeva.
“When I conceptualized, designed, and wrote the first iteration of CHURL during my time as a master's student at Concordia University, I did not aim to create a hybrid text/game so off-putting and weird that it defies straightforward categorization — that is simply what my academic and creative work has always been about! And it has been so cool to be encouraged by everyone to go further, bigger, louder with this perspective throughout my time as a student at Concordia, all the way to this fellowship.
Radoeva’s creative pursuits blend literature, digital media and game design into unique narrative experiences. Previously, she was one of four graduate recipients of the Behaviour Interactive Research Chair Graduate Scholarship, supporting innovative game design projects at Concordia.
Her fellowship project, CHURL, is a multimedia interactive fiction game that reimagines the medieval epic Beowulf. Through fragmented texts, fictional blog posts and broken hyperlinks, players explore a speculative world where the story of Beowulf is being reconstructed by a digital archivist and her feline familiars. The piece blurs boundaries between poetry, game design, speculative fiction and literary adaptation.
With the support of the fellowship, Radoeva plans to develop the second act of CHURL, expand its technical features through coding and multimedia elements, and bring the project to wider audiences via her own web hosting platform. She also aims to share excerpts in literary journals and explore live performance readings that highlight the polyvocal nature of her work.
“I cannot wait to see how much farther I can take CHURL with this opportunity, and most importantly, I am itching to get my hands messy with this multilayered beast of a writing project again,” says Radoeva.
