Linda Zagorskaya
MA
Too curious to sit still. Too stubborn to specialize.
Across borders, languages, and a few reinventions.
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MA
Too curious to sit still. Too stubborn to specialize.
Across borders, languages, and a few reinventions.
About
I was born in the Soviet Union. My grandparents were creative, generous people. From them I inherited curiosity and a restless love of words.
Languages came early. English, French, Italian. Growing up behind the Iron Curtain, they were my way of reaching a world I couldn't yet visit.
By fifteen, I was one year short of a diploma. Empires have terrible timing. In 1993, we moved to the United States. I carried with me my languages and the quiet suspicion that home would always be a plural noun.
I landed in New York, where I studied, worked, and discovered that starting over is itself a skill.
In 1997, I crossed the Atlantic again. This time to French-speaking Switzerland, where I would spend the next twenty-seven years.
Europe opened everything. A different country was always just a few hours away, and I took every road that opened up before me. Every border crossing was an education. Not in geography, but in how differently people think, eat, love, and disagree.
Switzerland gave me structure and precision. The rest of Europe gave me flavors, friendships, and the understanding that there is never just one way to live.
I founded two architectural firms in Switzerland. A decade of luxury construction, high-end international clients, and the kind of projects where discretion mattered as much as design.
The buildings were beautiful, but what I really built was an understanding of how complexity works. How to sit in a room with engineers, lawyers, and clients — in three languages — and find the one sentence that unlocks everything. How to walk onto a site with a hundred workers and make things move. How to read a contract the way I read novels: between the lines.
Extraordinary design, cutting-edge technology, remarkable people. Some of my deepest friendships were forged over blueprints and impossible deadlines. It was creative work in the truest sense: turning someone's vision into something tangible.
One degree was not enough and the dream of returning to university never quite went away. One day, I stopped postponing and enrolled.
A bachelor's in English, then a master's in English and literary translation, both at the University of Lausanne, earned while working, teaching, and raising children. Apparently, I don't know how to do things one at a time.
Academic life turned out to be its own form of creativity. The thrill of an argument that holds together, a thesis that finally clicks, the particular joy of discovering that a question you asked has never been asked before. I loved every exhausting minute of it.
The world changes and not always for the best, so I became an interpreter. For two years, I worked with Ukrainian families displaced by war. Consecutive interpretation in French and Russian, in healthcare, immigration, and education settings.
There is no wordplay here. When you translate someone's fear and grief into a language that might help them, the weight of getting it right is unlike anything else. Every conversation was urgent. Every silence was full.
It was the most humbling work I have ever done. It was also the most meaningful. It gave me something no degree can teach: the knowledge that words, when they land right, can change a life.
In 2024, after twenty-seven years in Switzerland, we moved back to the United States to get a new start.
We live now between Colorado for the mountains and the open sky, and New York for the culture and the energy. The kids are off to college this year. A new chapter — lighter, more open, full of possibility.
I founded Whims & Words LLC, built around the things I do best: multilingual project management, translation, and working with people.
Beyond the CV
Behind the three languages and three countries, there is a simpler truth: I have never been able to stop being curious. About places, about food, about how people live differently and somehow arrive at the same emotions.
A blended family of seven children. Visited nearly every country in Europe. Australia. The Arctic edge of Canada. Alaska. Still many more roads to travel.
My ideal life — and increasingly, my actual life — is one of slow, permanent discovery. Not the kind of travel where you visit five capitals in a week and take photographs to prove you were there. The kind where you stay long enough to learn which bakery opens first, where the locals go when it rains, and how to say thank you in a way that sounds like you mean it.
Work in progress
Executive Support · Project Management · Translation
Managing complexity, communicating across cultures, getting things done. In three languages.
Coming soonLife · Travel · Writing
Not a travel blog. Something more honest.
Coming soonMultilingual
Get in touch
Whether it's about a project, a collaboration, or life between continents — I'm always open to a good conversation.
linda@whimsandwords.com