Mother tongue

The BBC's new acting Director of Distribution, Garazi Goia, is something of a polymath. Fluent in Basque, Spanish and French, she studied for six years at the Basque university Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, to gain an MSc in Telecommunications Engineering. She then headed to London in 2003, working on DVD authoring projects, and then back to Spain for a project standardising and launching interactive services on digital tv. Thence to Auntie's distribution team in 2007.

Alongside that, she's written two novels in Basque. The first "Bi Hitz" (Two Words) published in 2008, and translated into Spanish in 2011, was spookily about the problems of a young woman alone in London, searching, actively but rather unhappily, for love, and the second Txartel bat (des) herrira, published last year, about children exiled from the Basque homeland in the Spanish Civil War. In between she contributed to a collection of essays "Orgasmus". Her's was entitled "Unknown unknowns"; the Google Basque translation tool is not much help beyond that...