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Category: Literature

Author Talks: Kim Eui-Kyung

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In her absorbing and candid novel Hello Baby, Kim Eui Kyung explores what women endure to become mothers. The novel features six women in their thirties and forties who strike up a friendship at a fertility clinic in Seoul and share their personal paths to motherhood via a group chat they name “Hello Baby.” Switching between the six characters—a journalist, a police officer, a vet, a lawyer, and two housewives—this thought-provoking novel explores the social pressure and emotional strain on women struggling to conceive. Written with insight, humor, and great empathy, Hello Baby is a moving portrait of what it means to be a woman today and the lengths some will go to seek motherhood.

In this episode of Author Talks, Kim Eui-Kyung discusses her novel, translated into English by Sora Kim-Russell.

About the Author

Author

Kim Eui-kyung

Kim Eui-kyung is a novelist and essayist. Her debut novel, Youth Bankruptcy (2014) won the Korea Economic Daily Youth Literary Contest, and her second novel Call Center was awarded the 6th Soorim Literary Prize. She also published the story collection Showroom, set against the backdrop of IKEA, and the essay collection The Season Called Life. Her latest novel Hello Baby is a groundbreaking work of Korean feminist fiction about a group of women undergoing IVF at a fertility clinic in Seoul.

Author Talks:
Kim Choyeop & Anton Hur

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In If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light, Korean science fiction superstar Kim Choyeop leads us to places we never thought we’d reach, imagining worlds galaxies away and unfamiliar lifeforms with near-dizzying humanity. A stunning and poignant collection of literary speculative fiction stories that explore the complexities of identity, love, death, and the search for life’s meaning, Kim’s stories dismantle the borders between normal and abnormal, material and abstract, earthly and otherworldly. With unforgettable inventiveness and pathos,  If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light heralds the arrival of an essential voice in contemporary fiction.

In this episode of Author Talks, Kim and her English translator Anton Hur discuss her English debut.

About the Authors:

Kim Choyeop has a master’s degree in biochemistry from Pohang University of Science and Technology. When she burst onto the Korean literary scene, her short story ‘Lost on Premises’ received immediate recognition at the 2017 Korean Science Fiction Awards. She is also the recipient of the Minumsa Writer of the Year Award and the Munhak Dongne Young Writer Award. Her first short story collection If We Can’t Travel at the Speed of Light has sold over two hundred thousand copies in Korea alone. She is also the author of two more short story collections, The World I Just Left Behind and The Bookstore of Planetary Languages. Kim’s first novel, Greenhouse At the End of the Earth, became an instant bestseller in South Korea.

Anton Hur is the author of Toward Eternity and the translator of Kim Choyeop’s If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light, Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, Baek Sehee’s I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, Lee Seong-bok’s That Summer’s End, Kyung-Sook Shin’s Violets, and others. He was double-longlisted and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, a finalist for the National Book Award, and nominated for the Dublin Literary Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He resides in Seoul.

Across Languages:
New Voices in Korean Poetry

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Across Languages: New Voices in Korean Poetry brings together acclaimed South Korean poets Lee Jenny, Yoo Heekyung, Oh Eun, and Shin Hae-uk with award-winning literary translators Archana Madhavan and Stine An, for a Korean–English bilingual reading and conversation to share the dynamism and innovations of language in Korean poetry culture. Through poetry and discussion, the speakers examine the cultural centrality of poetry in Korea and consider translation as a critical, creative practice that reshapes how literature circulates, sounds, and is felt across languages.

This program is presented in partnership with Ugly Duckling Presse and Zephyr Press.

       

About the Speakers:

Yoo Heekyung is an acclaimed South Korean poet, playwright, and essayist. He is the author of over ten collections of poetry and prose, including Today’s Morning Vocabulary (Moonji Books, 2011), Winter Night Rabbit Worries (Hyundae Munhak, 2023), and Photography and Poetry (Achimdal Books, 2024). Yoo studied creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts and playwriting at the Korea National University of Arts, and debuted as a poet in 2008 when his poem won the Chosun Ilbo’s spring literary contest. A recipient of Today’s Young Artist Award from the South Korean Ministry of Culture (2023), Hyundae Munhak Literary Award (2020), and the Gosan New Writer Award (2019), Yoo lives in Seoul where he runs the poetry bookshop and project space Wit N Cynical.

Lee Jenny is a South Korean poet and writer, born in Busan in 1972. In 2008, she made her literary debut with the poem “Peru” which won the Kyunghyang Daily News New Writer’s Award. She has since published four poetry collections: Maybe Africa (2010), As We Don’t Know Us (2014), The Things That Were Thus Scribbled (2019), The Sentences That Aren’t Even There are Beautiful (2019), Eternity Looks Back at the Future (2026), and an essay collection Dawn and Music (2024). She was the recipient of the Kim Hyun Literary Prize in 2016 and the Hyundae Munhak Award in 2022.

Oh Eun was born in Jeongeup, Jeollabuk-do in 1982. He graduated from the Department of Sociology at Seoul National University and received a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Culture Technology at KAIST. He began his poetic career in the pages of Modern Poetry in 2002. His work includes the poetry collections The Pigs at Hotel Tassel, We Love Ambience, Something from Something, The Left Hand’s Feelings are Hurt, I Had a Name, The Pronoun for Nothingness, the young adult poetry collection Matters of the Heart, and the essay collections You, I, and Yellow, Patting, Wearing Green, Why Not, People Who Only Become Kin at Night. He has won the Park In-hwan Literary Award, Gu Sang Poetry Award, Modern Poetry Award, Poet’s Notebook Award and Daesan Literary Award. He belongs to the poetry collective Jangnan(作亂).

Shin Hae-uk was born in Chuncheon in 1974. Shin’s major works include the poetry collections Precise Arrangement, Biologicity, syzygy, Caecilians, and Natural History from the Edge of the Natural; the novel The Dream Reader Electrical Shop; and the essay collections Book for Just One and Looking out the Window. Her honors include the Kim Hyun Literature Award, the Shin Tong-mun Literature Prize and the Daesan Literature Award.

Stine An is a poet, literary translator, and performer in New York City. She holds a BA in Literature from Harvard College and an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University and is the recipient of fellowships and grants from The Poetry Project, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, Yaddo, ALTA, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her publications include Today’s Morning Vocabulary (Zephyr Press, 2025) and Winter Night Rabbit Worries (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2026) by Yoo Heekyung, and S_MMER CR_SH (Sarabande Books, 2025). Their debut poetry collection, B-Dragon Suite, is a winner of the 2023 Nightboat Poetry Prize.

Archana Madhavan translates Korean poetry and prose into English. Her past book-length works include Kim Hyun’s Glory Hole (co-translation, 2022) and Amil’s Roadkill (2025). Her translation of Lee Jenny’s first book of poetry Pirowa Padowa was shortlisted for the Granum Translation Prize in 2023 and won the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize in 2024. She lives in San Jose, California.

Author Talks:
Bo-young Kim

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“Her fiction is a breath-taking piece of cinematic art itself. Reminiscent of the world we experienced in Matrix, Inception, and Dark City, still it leads us to this entirely original structure, which is a ground-breaking, mystic literary and cinematic experience. Indeed, powerful and graceful.”—Bong Joon-ho, Oscar-winning director of Parasite

In her mind-expanding work of speculative fiction, Bo-young Kim explores the driving forces of humanity—love, hope, creation, destruction, and the very meaning of existence. Straddling science fiction, fantasy and myth, her strikingly original, thought-provoking work teems with human and non-human beings, all of whom are striving to survive through evolution, whether biologically, technologically or socially. Kim’s literature of ideas offers some of the most rigorous and surprisingly poignant reflections on posthuman existence being written today.

An award-winning author widely recognized as a pioneer and inspiration in Korean literature, Bo-young Kim discusses her career in this episode of Author Talks.

 

About the Author:

Bo-Young Kim is a Korean speculative-fiction writer. Her debut work, a novella titled The Experience of Touch, unanimously won the award for the best novella at the Korean Science & Technology Creative Writing Awards in 2004. In 2010 she published a two-volume collection of short stories, The Story Goes That Far and An Evolutionary Myth. 2013 saw the publication of her first novel, The Seven Executioners, which won the South Korean SF Award. Her international recognition grew with On the Origin of Species and Other Stories, translated by Sora Kim-Russell and Joungmin Lee Comfort, which was longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Before her career as an author, she worked as a screenwriter, game developer, and graphic designer; she has also worked as a script advisor for Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer.

Author Talks: Kim Hana & Hwang Sunwoo

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Two Women Living Together, the bestselling Korean memoir by Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo, is an insightful and heartwarming book that offers a fresh perspective on female friendship, chosen family, and the different ways one can make a “good” life. 

After years of living alone, Hana and Sunwoo, two single women in their forties, decided to pool their resources and buy an apartment together. What started as a practical arrangement blossomed into a profound partnership, a found family of two women and their four adorable cats. Two Women Living Together chronicles their journey, exploring the joys and challenges of cohabitation, from navigating finances to supporting each other through career changes and personal loss.

Two Women Living Together was a sensation in South Korea, resonating with a generation of women redefining their own paths. Its universal themes have led to its translation into multiple languages and a feature in The New York Times that highlighted its role in amplifying women’s voices and challenging traditional familial structures in South Korea. At a time when conversations around singledom, chosen family, and the evolving definition of partnership are more relevant than ever, Two Women Living Together offers a timely and resonant narrative. It is a celebration of a different kind of life, one built on friendship, mutual respect, and the radical notion that a fulfilling life doesn’t require a romantic partner.

 

 

 

Author Talks: Kim Hana & Hwang Sunwoo

Tuesday, January 20, 2026


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

 

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About the Authors:

Kim Hana is originally from Busan and moved to Seoul at the age of nineteen. As the host of a podcast for South Korea’s largest online bookstore, she has shared a variety of books and authors with the general public. Her own books include Golden Bell Sound and Talking about Speaking. She is the co-host of the Two Women Talking Together podcast with her co-author and cohabitant Hwang Sunwoo.

Hwang Sunwoo, also from Busan, is now living in Seoul with her cohabitant Kim Hana. She has worked as a features director for the fashion magazine W Korea for many years and is an editor, essayist, and interviewer. Co-author of the book and co-host of the podcast Two Women Living Together, her other books include You’ll Die Doing Your Best and The Courage to Say I Love You. When she’s not working, she spends her time as a recreational athlete and amateur musician.

In case you missed it:
Author Talks: You-Jeong Jeong Author Talks: Cheon Seon-Ran Author Talks: Kyung-Ran Jo Author Talks: Lee Chang-dong

Author Talks: You-Jeong Jeong

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Ed Park: An Oral History of Atlantis with Mira Jacob

Author Photo © Hong Jinwhan

From master of crime and suspense fiction You-Jeong Jeong comes Perfect Happiness, a thrilling domestic nightmare.

Everyone in Yuna’s life is desperate to keep her happy: her partners, parents, and terrified six-year-old daughter. Even when she’s not blaming or hitting, the threat of her mood keeps her family from bonding, touching, or even speaking long enough to realize she’s playing them against each other. But when little Jiyoo’s feverish memories of loons hint at a troubling crime, Yuna’s estranged sister and guilt-ridden husband begin to reconstruct her movements, the unexplained tragedies in Yuna’s history, and the lies she’s told for years. For the first time, Yuna’s traumatized family members will have to confront the truth of her depravity and learn that no one—no matter how young—is safe from her wrath. After all, Yuna believes that happiness requires subtraction. And she wants nothing less than perfect happiness.

In this episode of Author Talks, You-Jeong Jeong discusses her career in Korea and the latest English translation of her novel.

 

Author Talks: You-Jeong Jeong

Thursday, October 9, 2025


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

 

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About the Speaker:

 

You-Jeong Jeong is an award-winning and bestselling author of psychological thrillers and crime fiction. Her novels Seven Years of Darkness, 28, and The Good Son were selected as “Book of the Year” by major media outlets and bookstores, gaining widespread acclaim. These works have been translated and published in twenty-three countries, including the U.S., UK, France, Germany, Finland, China, Japan, and Brazil. 

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Ed Park: An Oral History of Atlantis with Mira Jacob

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Ed Park: An Oral History of Atlantis with Mira Jacob

 

A deadpan, wildly imaginative collection of stories that slices clean through the mundanity and absurdity of modern life, An Oral History of Atlantis is the newest collection of short stories from Ed Park, the author of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Same Bed Different Dreams.

In this utterly original collection, characters question the fleetingness of youth and art, reckon with the consequences of the everyday, and find solace in the absurd, the beautiful, and the sublime. Throughout, Ed Park deploys his trademark wit to create a world both strikingly recognizable and delightfully other. All together, these fifteen stories have much to say about the meaning—and transitory nature—of our lives. And they are proof positive that Ed Park is one of the most insightful and imaginative writers working today.

In this conversation with Mira Jacob, presented in collaboration with Yu & Me Books, Ed Park discusses his latest book.

 

Ed Park: An Oral History of Atlantis with Mira Jacob

Thursday, September 4, 2025 | 6:30 PM (EDT)


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

 

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About the Speaker:

 

Ed Park is the author of the novels Personal Days and Same Bed Different Dreams. He is a founding editor of The Believer, and has worked in newspapers, book publishing, and academia. His writing appears in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Born in Buffalo, he lives in Manhattan with his family. 

 

About the Moderator:

 
 

Mira Jacob is a novelist, memoirist, illustrator, and cultural critic. Her graphic memoir Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, and named a New York Times Notable Book. Her novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick and named one of the best books of the year by Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe and Goodreads. She is a professor at The New School and a founding faculty member of the MFA in Writing at Randolph College.

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Author Talks: Cheon Seon-Ran

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Author Talks: Cheon Seon-Ran

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A bestseller in Korea, The Midnight Shift by Cheon Seon-Ran is a biting, fast-paced vampire murder mystery exploring queer love and the consequences of loneliness.

When four isolated elderly people die back-to-back at the same hospital by jumping out of the sixth-floor window, Su-Yeon doesn’t understand why she’s the only one at her precinct that seems to care. But her colleagues at the police force dismiss the case as a series of unfortunate suicides due to the patients’ loneliness. But Su-Yeon doesn’t have the privilege of looking away: her dearest friend, Grandma Eun-Shim, lives on the sixth floor, and Su-Yeon is terrified that something will happen to her next.

As Su-Yeon begins her investigation alone, she runs into a mysterious woman named Violette at the crime scene. Violette claims to be a vampire hunter, searching for her ex-lover, Lily, and is insistent that a vampire is behind the mysterious deaths. Su-Yeon is skeptical at first, but when a fifth victim jumps from the window, her investigation reveals the body was completely drained of blood. Desperate to discover the cause of the deaths, Su-Yeon considers Violette’s explanation-that something supernatural is involved.

A gripping mystery, The Midnight Shift overflows with commentary about societal isolation and loneliness, the sharp knife of grief, and the effects of marginalization.

In this episode of Author Talks, Cheon Seon-Ran discusses her career in Korea and the English translation of her novel.

 

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Author Talks: Cheon Seon-Ran

Tuesday, August 12, 2025 


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

 

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About the Speaker:

 

A lover of sci-fi always dreaming of the universe and waiting for aliens, Cheon Seon-Ran made her debut with Broken Bridges in 2019. She was awarded the Grand Prize in the 4th Korea Sci-Fi Literature Awards for her novel A Thousand Blues. 

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Julia Riew & Brad Riew @ The Strand

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Author Photos Ramona Park & Marcos Ramirez

Join us for an in-person event at The Strand with debut authors Julia Riew and Brad Riew for the release of their new novel The Last Tiger.

Inspired by true stories from the authors’ grandparents’ lives during one of the darkest periods in Korean history, The Last Tiger is a young adult fantasy novel about the power of love to give voice to a broken people.

In a colonized land where tigers are being hunted to extinction and ancient magic stirs, two star-crossed teens—Lee Seung, a servant yearning for freedom, and Choi Eunji, a noble girl defying tradition—join forces to try and reshape their respective fates.

But their relationship evolves from begrudging accomplices to bitter adversaries as they soon find themselves on opposite sides of a battle over the last tiger, a symbol of their people’s lost freedom and key to the liberation of their country. As the ties between Seung and Eunji are complicated by their conflicting loyalties, tensions rise—especially when a charming princeling of the empire begins to rival for Eunji’s affection.

In this friends-to-enemies-to-lovers story of forbidden romance, antagonists turned allies, oppression and liberation, neither Seung nor Eunji can abandon their mission—or each other. And as they embark on separate quests to find the elusive creature, each must also find the power within themselves to make their own destiny.

Joining Julia and Brad in conversation is critically acclaimed, bestselling author Chloe Gong.

 

Click Here to Purchase Your Ticket

 

Julia Riew & Brad Riew @ The Strand

Tuesday, July 29, 2025 | 7 PM


 Strand Book Store – 3rd Floor, Rare Book Room
828 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

 

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About the Speakers:

 

Julia Riew is a composer-lyricist, playwright, and novelist best known for her viral hit DIVE, a reimagining of the Korean folktale “Shimcheong,” which is currently being developed for the stage at the American Repertory Theater. In addition to winning the 2022 Fred Ebb Award for Musical Theater Songwriting, Julia has been Playbill’s Featured Songwriter of the Month, a Woman to Watch on Broadway, and a Princess Grace Honoraria recipient. Julia was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 2022 with a BA in theater and music.
 
 

Brad Riew is an MFA candidate in Fiction at New York University’s creative writing program. He graduated from Harvard College in 2018 with a degree in Psychology, where he won the Ecker Short Story Prize. The Last Tiger , co-written with his younger sister Julia Riew, is his first novel. Brad lives in Brooklyn, New York.

 

About the Moderator:
 
Photo Credit: One Grid Studio

Chloe Gong is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Secret Shanghai novels, as well as the Flesh and False Gods trilogy. Her books have been published in over twenty countries and have been featured in The New York Times, PEOPLE, Cosmopolitan, and more. She was named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 for 2024. Chloe graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in English and International Relations. Born in Shanghai and raised in Auckland, New Zealand, she is now located in New York City, pretending to be a real adult. Visit her online at thechloegong.com and on Instagram, X, and TikTok at @thechloegong.

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Author Talks: Kyung-Ran Jo

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Author Photo © Park Jae-hong

“A memorable existential tale.” —Publishers Weekly

An atmospheric, melancholic novel about a successful sculptor who decides to commit suicide by artfully preparing and deliberately eating a lethal dish of blowfish, Kyung-Ran Jo‘s Blowfish is a postmodern novel in four parts, alternating between the respective stories of a female sculptor and a male architect. The narrative loosely approximates a love story, but this is no romance in the normal sense. For the woman, the man is a pitstop on the road to her own suicide. For the man, the woman forestalls death and offers him a final chance. Through the conflicting impressions they have of one another, the characters look back on their lives; it is only the desire to create art that calls them back from death.

Evoking the heterogeneous urban spaces of Seoul and Tokyo, Blowfish delves into the inner life of a woman contemplating her failures in love and art. Jo’s fierce will to write animates the novel; the lethal taste of blowfish, which one cannot help but eat even though one may die in doing so, approximates the inexorable pains of writing a novel.

In this episode of Author Talks, Jo discusses her career in Korea and the English translation of her novel.

 

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Author Talks: Kyung-Ran Jo

Tuesday, July 15, 2025


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

 

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About the Speaker:

 

Kyung-Ran Jo made her literary debut in 1996 when her short story “The French Optical” won the Dong-a Ilbo New Writer’s Contest. She is the author of five story collections and three novels. Her novel Tongue was published in English by Bloomsbury in 2009. She is also the recipient of the Hyundae Munhak Award and the Dongin Prize, among others.

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