Yi T'aejun was one of twentieth-century Korea's true masters of the short story—and a man who in 1946 stunned his contemporaries by moving to the Soviet-occupied northern zone of his country. In South Korea, where he is known today as "one who went north," Yi's work was banned until 1988. His...

These nine stories span half a century of contemporary writing in Korea (1970s–2010s), bringing together some of the most famous twentieth-century women writers with a new generation of young, bold voices. Their work explores a world not often seen in the West, taking us into the homes, families,...

Dust and Other Stories offers a selection of Yi’s stories across time and place, showcasing a superb stylist caught up in the midst of his era’s most urgent ideological and aesthetic divides. This...

Mia et La môme se côtoient sans se connaître. Elles sont camarades de classe. Mia possède tout ce qu'un enfant peut désirer dans la vie, sauf l'essentiel. Quant à La môme, elle n'a pas cette chance...

Australia’s taste for translated literature is getting broader, and that’s a good thing. In Australia, small and independent presses have been leading the charge. Brow Books, the new books imprint of Melbourne literary magazine The Lifted Brow, recently announced a co-publishing agreement with UK-...

PEN America is thrilled to announce the longlists for the 2018 PEN America Literary Awards. PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE For a book-length translation of prose from any language into English published in 2017. The Impossible Fairy Tale, Han Yujoo (Graywolf Press) translated from the Korean by Janet Hong

Looking back on 2017, it’s easy to declare the year a success for literary translation, which continued to thrive and move in exciting new directions. Resisting again the temptation to expand our list, we offer an admittedly incomplete collection of the year’s English translations. Bandi, The...

To read Janet Poole’s sensitive translation of Yi T'aejun’s Dust and Other Stories is to experience both amazed discovery and a profound sense of loss. How could such a remarkable writer have his legacy effaced in his lifetime, and his death go unrecorded? Yet while the darkness about which Yi...

The Impossible Fairytale is told in two parts. The first part largely deals with an abused child’s diary. The second part is presented as the diary of the writer of this book. In the first part, Choi Mi-ah is killed by a classmate (in Korean, “mi-ah” means “lost child”). In the second part, the...

Few Korean literary writers since the turn of the century rival Han Yujoo in her deep awareness of writing. In the 1980s there was great interest in Korean literature that explored reality, and in the 1990s it was people’s interior lives, and since the 2000s, there has been a diversifying...