Poets & Writers Theater

In this event hosted by the Korea Society in New York, prolific and award-winning author Yu Miri talks about her family’s history under Japanese occupation, her struggles writing for Japanese and Korean readers as a Zainichi Korean author, and the themes in her latest translated novel, The End of August (Riverhead Books, 2023), translated from the Japanese by Morgan Giles.

“The moment kids start to lie is the moment storytelling begins.” Young-Ha Kim delivers a TEDx Talk about all children beginning as artists, novel writing as a process of composing one sentence after another, and the value of a world in which everyone creates art, whether in public or in private. Kim’s story collection Diary of a Murderer (Mariner Books, 2019), translated from the Korean by Krys Lee, is featured in Page One in the May/June 2019 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I’m not there to serve the author or serve the text, I’m there to interpret it.” In this video, writer and translator Anton Hur speaks about the role of the translator, Korean literature, and his work on the novel Counterweight (Pantheon, 2023) by the pseudonymous South Korean science fiction author Djuna.

In this 2019 Louisiana Channel interview, Man Booker–winning author Han Kang speaks about the origins of her writing from her love of books to her questions about humanity. “When we are confronted by the horror of humanity, we have to question ourselves,” says Kang. Her new novel, Greek Lessons (Hogarth, 2023), translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won, is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Center for Fiction virtual event, Sora Kim-Russell, editor and Korean literature translator, joins Alex Zucker for a conversation about revision, editing, and co-translation. The center’s Literary Translation Clinics are a monthly series of knowledge-sharing open sessions with a focus on literary translation as a profession hosted by members of the translator collective, Cedilla & Co.

“As a translator, you could do two thousand things right, but someone is going to notice the two things you do wrong, so it’s really an impossible art.” Krys Lee, whose translation from the Korean of Young-Ha Kim’s story collection Diary of a Murderer (Mariner Books, 2019) is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, talks about the inherent difficulties of literary translation.