About me
I’m Jack Fleming Vaughan, the founder of LyraLingua.
and wanted to be an artist. Then I discovered Ancient Egypt and wanted to be an Egyptologist. I also fell in love with books — with reading them and writing stories of my own — and for a time I imagined becoming a writer. And around the same time, I became fascinated by space and astrophysics and decided that what I really wanted to understand the universe. As you can see, my interests were never going to fit neatly into one category.
drawn by many of the same questions that had fascinated me in science: what is reality? What does it mean to be conscious? Philosophy then led me to psychoanalysis, and I went on to study that too — moving from the mysteries of the universe to the mysteries of the human mind.
While living in Dublin, I — a middle-class Englishman fresh out of Cambridge — formed a beatbox-and-rap duo with a working-class Irish rapper fresh out of prison — despite my musical tastes running more to Mozart and Jimi Hendrix than hip-hop. People liked our story as much as the music, and for a while we became surprisingly well known, with newspaper and radio interviews and performances in places I had never imagined ending up.
Teaching took me across almost every age group, from three-year-olds in nursery school to adults at university, and across an equally broad range of subjects: maths and physics, music and art, languages, history, literature and political geography.
Well, having grown up in Belgium with British parents, and now living in Spain, I have always been surrounded by different languages and cultures, which is one of the reasons I later became a conference interpreter. This job also suits my curiosity rather well, as I interpret everything from whisky tastings to meetings between heads of state. Interpreting is a great profession for someone who enjoys variety and being an eternal student.
Looking back, perhaps the only consistent thread is that I’ve always been curious enough to follow interesting things wherever they led. And that is one of the reasons I’m so excited about LyraLingua.
For perhaps the first time, I have a project where all these different strands of my life come together. The books draw together languages, literature, storytelling, history and visual art. The podcast gives me even more freedom: I can talk about science, philosophy or psychology one week, and tell a funny story or follow an unexpected train of thought the next.
And there is another reason I’m so excited about this project. I’ve learned a few languages over the years, and I love that moment when you no longer need to look at the language itself — the grammar, vocabulary, and so on — and can start looking through it. The language starts to become transparent, like a window onto something else: you read or listen because you want to know what happens next or learn something new.
That is the experience that I want LyraLingua to offer.
My books and podcasts use language to go beyond language — into stories, ideas and discoveries that are interesting in their own right.