Category: Arts & Culture

Extraordinarily beautiful and deeply moving, The Liberators by E. J. Koh is an elegantly wrought family saga of memory, trauma, and empathy, and a stunning testament to the consequences and fortunes of inheritance. From the Gwangju Massacre to the 1988 Olympics, flashbacks to Korean repatriation

A moving and lyrical debut novel. . . . Koh has fully harnessed her potential in this assured outing.—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

An epic saga.—Book Page, A Most Anticipated Fiction Book of Fall 2023

At the height of the military dictatorship in South Korea, Insuk and Sungho are arranged to be married. The couple soon moves to San Jose, California, with an infant and Sungho’s overbearing mother-in-law. Adrift in a new country, Insuk grieves the loss of her past and her divided homeland, finding herself drawn into an illicit relationship that sets into motion a dramatic saga and echoes for generations to come.

Extraordinarily beautiful and deeply moving, The Liberators by E. J. Koh is an elegantly wrought family saga of memory, trauma, and empathy, and a stunning testament to the consequences and fortunes of inheritance. From the Gwangju Massacre to the 1988 Olympics, flashbacks to Korean repatriation after Japanese surrender, and the Sewol ferry accident, Koh’s exquisitely drawn portraits and symphonic testimony from guards, prisoners, perpetrators, and liberators spans continents and four generations of two Korean families forever changed by fateful past decisions made in love and war.

In this conversation with Anton Hur, E. J. Koh discusses her debut novel.

The Korea Society
350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor
New York, NY 10017

About the Author:

E. J. Koh is the author of The Magical Language of Others, which won a Washington State Book Award, Pacific Northwest Book Award, and Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, and was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. Koh is also the author of the poetry collection A Lesser Love, a Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry winner. Koh’s work has appeared in AGNI, the Atlantic, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, Slate, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. Koh earned her MFA at Columbia University and her PhD at the University of Washington, and has received National Endowment for the Arts and MacDowell fellowships. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

About the Moderator:

Anton Hur is the author of Toward Eternity (HarperVia) and No One Told Me Not To (Across Books). As a translator, he was double-longlisted and shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize. He resides in Seoul.

An “antic, madcap noir with flair” (Wired) and “fast-paced cyberpunk story” (The New York Times Book Review) from one of South Korea’s most revered science fiction writers, whose identity remains unknown

“An efficient, fast-paced cyberpunk story . . . The novel’s speculations about human agency resonate in the current moment, when American tech C.E.O.s oscillate between issuing sonorous warnings about the existential risks of the A.I. systems they’re developing and breathless hype about brain-computer interfaces. The book imagines the imminent emergence of companies run by artificial intelligence—companies as intelligence, a fusion of technology and economic logic that will definitively outrun humanity.” —Hari Kunzru, The New York Times Book Review

An “antic, madcap noir with flair” (Wired) and “fast-paced cyberpunk story” (The New York Times Book Review) from one of South Korea’s most revered science fiction writers, whose identity remains unknown, Djuna’s Counterweight is an absorbing tale of corporate intrigue, political unrest, unsolved mysteries, and the havoc wreaked by one company’s monomaniacal endeavor to build the world’s first space elevator.

Originally conceived by Djuna as a low-budget science fiction film, with literary references as wide-ranging as Joseph Conrad and the Marquis de Sade, Counterweight is part cyberpunk, part hard-boiled detective fiction, and part parable of South Korea’s neocolonial ambition and its rippling effects.

Djuna is a novelist and film critic, and a former chair of the Korean Science Fiction Writers Union. For more than twenty years they have published as a faceless writer, refusing to reveal personal details regarding age, gender, or legal name. Widely considered to be one of South Korea’s most important science fiction writers, Djuna has published ten short-story collections and five novels.

Anton Hur, the award winning translator of many Korean literature, discusses Djuna’s writings and their impact in Korea, the genre of Korean science fiction, and literary translation from Korean to English in this conversation with Matthew Sciarappa.

During the event, Counterweight will be available for sale.

The Korea Society
350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor
New York, NY 10017

About the Speaker:

Anton Hur is the author of Toward Eternity (HarperVia) and No One Told Me Not To (Across Books). He was born in Stockholm and currently resides in Seoul. He studied law and psychology at Korea University and specialized in Victorian poetry at the Seoul National University Graduate School English program under Dr. Nancy Jiwon Cho. He won a PEN Translates grant for his translation of The Underground Village by Kang Kyeong-ae and a PEN/Heim grant for Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, the latter of which was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize is a finalist for the 2023 National Book Awards. His translation of Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City was longlisted for the same prize in the same year. His translation of Violets was longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Awards. His other translations include Kyung-Sook Shin’s The Court Dancer and I Went to See My Father, Djuna’s Counterweight, and Baek Sehee’s I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki. His co-translation of Beyond the Story: 10-Year History of BTS debuted at #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List. He has taught at the British Centre for Literary Translation, the Ewha University Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation, and the Bread Loaf Translators Conference. 

About the Moderator:

Matthew Sciarappa is a Marketing and Social Media Manager for the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, where he has coordinated campaigns for award-winning authors such as Orhan Pamuk, Sandra Cisneros, and Cormac McCarthy. He runs self-titled Booktube and Bookstagram channels and currently resides in Brooklyn.

Author photo courtesy of Tilted Axis Press

In 2020, beloved Zainichi Korean writer Yu Miri and prize-winning translator Morgan Giles won the National Book Award in Translated Literature for Tokyo Ueno Station, a deeply emotional and unflinchingly bold novel that highlighted the socioeconomic injustices and devastating human cost of modernization.

“Artful and kinetic…This has a power of its own.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“Yu’s passion for rescuing history from violence is palpable on every page.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS

In 2020, beloved Zainichi Korean writer Yu Miri and prize-winning translator Morgan Giles won the National Book Award in Translated Literature for Tokyo Ueno Station, a deeply emotional and unflinchingly bold novel that highlighted the socioeconomic injustices and devastating human cost of modernization. Called “a creative genius” by the New York Times, Yu Miri was born to Korean parents in Japan and is famous for bringing a razor-sharp “outsider” perspective to her work, writing about those who have been pushed into the margins of society. She has over twenty books to her name, has received the Akutagawa (Japan’s most prestigious literary award) and now, with a National Book Award under her belt, her popularity among English-language readers continues to grow.

The profound ways in which our history is never actually left in the past but is instead directly connected to our ever-moving present moment is the idea at the heart of Yu Miri’s astounding new novel, The End of August. Widely seen as Yu Miri’s most ambitious, most personal work, The End of August is a spellbinding multigenerational saga based on Yu Miri’s own family history, filled with death, love, betrayal, war, political upheaval, and ghosts. The story was deemed too controversial for print when it was first serialized in Japan in the early 2000s: Yu Miri was among the first to widely tell the stories of Korean comfort women among Japanese forces during WWII, and about the oppression that Koreans living under Japanese occupation endured. This is a groundbreaking epic from a singular, brilliant writer, comprised of fragmented sentences, dialogue written as if from a play, and streams of consciousness.

In this episode of Author Talks, Yu Miri discusses her career and the most recent translation of her novel.

The Korea Society
350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor
New York, NY 10017

About the Speaker:

A Korean author writing in Japanese, Yu Miri has over twenty books to her name. She received Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, and her novel Tokyo Ueno Station won the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature. After the earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima, she relocated there and has opened a bookstore and theater space.