NOVEMBER WEBINAR
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19TH, 7 PM - 8 PM (CST)
WRITING EMPATHY: A CONVERSATION WITH AUTHOR CHO HAEJIN AND TRANSLATOR JI-EUN LEE
Korean literature has received unprecedented attention from international readers and critics in recent years, and this conversation with author Cho Haejin and translator Ji-Eun Lee offers a chance to explore this vibrant literary field with one of its major figures.
I Met Loh Kiwan (로기완을 만났다, 2011, trans. 2019), winner of the 2013 Shin Dong-yup Prize for Literature, is a poignant novel following North Korean refugee Loh Kiwan to Brussels, Belgium, a place where he doesn't speak the language or understand the customs. His story of hardship and determination is gradually revealed in flashbacks by the narrator, Kim, a writer from South Korea who, while tracing Loh's progress from North Korea to Brussels to London, turns this journey into her own search for the meaning of life amidst tremendous loss and despair. Kim's encounters with Pak, a doctor who helps Loh and Kim on their journeys, adds further depth to these issues through gradual revelations about life and death decisions he faced with his patients, and the remorse they caused. Cho Haejin weaves details of these characters into a story of hope and trust that asks basic questions about what it means to be human and humane.
How to purchase the book:
1. From our local bookstore Left Bank Books (CWE) either over the phone (314-367-6731) or through their website: https://www.left-bank.com/book/9780824880033
2. From the publisher University of Hawai'i Press with 20% discount code "PACS20": https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/i-met-loh-kiwan/
3. Amazon has both digital Kindle version and a paper version https://smile.amazon.com/Met-Kiwan-Modern-Korean-Fiction-ebook/dp/B07L3TY6D1/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1603923155&sr=1-1-791c2399-d602-4248-afbb-8a79de2d236f
4. For a digital copy of Korean book: https://ridibooks.com/books/754008227?_s=search&_q=로기완을+만났다
About the author, Cho Haejin
Since winning the Munye Chungang's Newcomer's Award for her writing debut in 2004, Cho Haejin has solidified her reputation as one of South Korea's major writers with five novels and three collections of short stories. Her works have been shortlisted for most of the major literary awards in Korea and won several, including the 2016 Yi Hyo-seok Literary Prize and the 2013 Shin Dong-yup Prize for Literature for the novel I Met Loh Kiwan (로기완을 만났다, 2011). In 2019, she won the prestigious Daesan Literary Award for her most recent novel Simple Sincerity (단순한 진심, 2019), which features a French-Korean adoptee's journey back to her origins. Described as a writer of compassion and tenderness, her works highlight people pushed to the margins of society — people viewed as "others" (t'aja) by those, both within Korea and beyond, who inhabit society's presumed mainstream.
Ms. Cho is a graduate of Ewha Womans University (BA and MA), and she taught a fiction writing course at Wash U in 2013 during her stay at Wash U with the Overseas Writer's Residence Program sponsored by Literary Translation Institute of Korea and hosted by East Asian Languages and Literature at Washington U. She stayed in STL through the Residency program for about five months.
About the translator, Ji-Eun Lee
As a scholar of Korean literature with a comparative background, Ji-Eun Lee's research interest covers from the nineteenth century to contemporary times, with topics including women and gender, print culture and book history, memory and postmemory, and travel and domesticity. She is the author of Women Pre-scripted: Forging Modern Roles through Korean Print (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015) which examined how “woman,” as an ambivalent symbol of both progress and backwardness, was constructed and remolded according to changing ideals and challenges of modernity during one of the most turbulent times in Korean history. She is currently pursuing two main writing projects: a book-length study on domesticity and travels by Colonial Korean woman writers; and another on memory and space in post-Cold War Korean literature. The latter uses theories of memory and postmemory as lenses for studying the disappearance of the master narrative and reappearance of history as embodied memory in contemporary South Korean literature, exampled in works such as Human Acts by Han Kang. Dedicated also to translation of literary works, Lee has been involved in several translation projects including short stories, poetry, and most recently the award-winning Korean novel I Met Loh Kiwan by Haejin Cho (University of Hawai’I Press, 2019). Ji-Eun Lee received her Ph.D from Harvard University and is an associate professor of Korean Language and Literature and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis.