LTI Korea 
DLKL 
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LTI Korea Now
Between Sentences: Reflections from An LTI Korea Translation Award Winner
Visitors to the annual Frankfurt Book Fair can encounter booths from countries all over the world, each making a concerted effort to introduce its national literature to an international audience. Korea is no exception. Founded in 1996 as the Korean Literature Translation Fund and later designated a special corporation under the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism in 2005, the Literature Translation Institute of Korea is now marking thirty years as a leading force behind Korean literature’s global outreach. During that time, LTI Korea has financially supported the publication of more than 2,400 works of Korean literature in forty-four countries and continues to play an active role in funding translations today. I got my own start as a translator in the winter of 1998 when I received a grant from the Korean Literature Translation Fund. In that sense, my career and LTI Korea can be said to have practically grown alongside each other. While Korea is now one of the world’s top dream travel destinations, there was a time not so long ago when it was hard to find foreigners who had even heard of the country. The LTI Korea Translation Award was established in 1993 to foster more professional literary translators and to raise interest in literary translation both in Korea and abroad by selecting outstanding translations among the works of Korean literature published overseas. Now every year, first-, second-, and third-place prizes are awarded to translations of Korean literature into three foreign languages. I was honored to receive the 2025 prize alongside Najbar-Miller Justyna Agata, the Polish translator of Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, and Tayfun Kartav, the Turkish translator of Chang Kang-myoung’s Homodominance. Given how few awards exist for translators, it should not be surprising that this one is so highly coveted in our field.When I first learned the news, my immediate thought was that I owed this honor to the unwavering support of LTI Korea, which has worked tirelessly for decades to make Korean literature truly global. At the end of last November, I returned to Korea to accept the award—my first winter visit since my study-abroad days. Although my visit was brief, feeling the full force of winter in my homeland again was a deeply moving experience. The ceremony brought together my fellow LTI Korea Translation Award recipients, winners of the Award for Aspiring Translators and the Outstanding Service Award, esteemed guests and judges there to congratulate the winners, and representatives from LTI Korea and the Ministry of Culture. What delighted me the most was getting to meet and talk with translators I had previously known only by name. A fleeting thought crossed my mind that day: How great would it be if there were a regular gathering like this, where translators of Korean literature could come together to exchange and discuss ideas? In all honesty, I never once dreamed of becoming a translator. I had always kept works of foreign literature close at hand, but I never imagined I would be the one to translate such stories myself. Had it not been for that fateful translation grant twenty-eight years ago, I would likely have continued to read foreign literature while remaining largely oblivious to the time and painstaking effort that translators put into their craft. There is a saying that goes: Translation is treason. A task that requires restraint, wavering between the more literal translation and the more liberal one, resisting the urge to interpret or alter each word and sentence according to one’s own whims. Work that leaves the translator lost in unfamiliar woods, sometimes missing the beauty that lies beyond the forest of the source text. I have spent countless long and grueling hours on this task—from my very first translation, Kim Jooyoung’s A Fisherman Does Not Break the Reeds, to the more than forty works of Korean literature I have translated into German since. I still vividly remember the days I spent wandering from library to library with thick Korean-German and German- Korean dictionaries in tow. I also remember, like it was only yesterday, how happy I was when the advent of online dictionaries lifted that literal weight off my shoulders. And now, I’ve gotten to a point where I don’t need a dictionary at all. The world has changed over the years, yet I am still living as a translator, drifting between sentences. Each time I complete a manuscript, I am reminded yet again how difficult and arduous a task translation still is. Before I can even savor the joy of holding a published translation of mine in my hands, the fear of critics and judgment comes rushing in. And yet the moment I encounter new words and sentences, sometimes chilling and other times indescribably beautiful, my insistence that I have no more translations left in me completely falls away, and before I know it, I am drawing a breath and stepping up to face another work of literature head-on. A translated work’s journey into the world can never be accomplished through the translator’s efforts alone. The voyage is made possible by the excellent editors who toil alongside us, refining the text to breathe new life into it in the reader’s language. Likewise, I know I’m where I am today thanks to the translators who came before me—those who, by the time I started knocking on random German publishers’ doors with my first translation in hand, had sowed the seeds that allowed Korean literature to take root in a land once barren of our stories— as well as my dedicated fellow translators who are every day, in places unseen, walking this path with me. Looking ahead, I sincerely hope that LTI Korea will remain a steadfast source of support for young translators on this same journey.
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Book Cart
Synchronized Sea Anemone / Grandma / The Cheerful Life of Lee Si-bong, Short and Struggle-Free / The Cut
Synchronized Sea Anemone by Kim HyesoonNanda, 2025, 196 pagesGrandma by Hwang Sok-yongChangbi Publishers, 2025, 224 pagesLandmark feminist poet Kim Hyesoon has returned with her newest poetry collection. The first publication in the Nanda Poetry Series, Synchronized Sea Anemone is composed of sixty-five previously unpublished poems divided into eight sections. Rounding out the collection is a letter from the writer and an English translation of the titular poem by Mia You. Kim herself has said she wrote these poems as a way of shocking her system, the works serving as a bucket of cold water jolting her out of a previously “dark, dark, dark, shadow.” Fittingly, her words seem to dance across each page, with playful descriptions and straightforward professions of affection mingling with her characteristic explorations of gender and identity.Hwang Sok-yong’s Grandma opens with a scene of death begetting life: a dusky thrush meets its end near an estuary, but the small seed in its stomach is returned to the soil and grows into a giant tree—Halmae, or Grandma. This guardian deity forms the axis around which the narrative unfolds. In his first novel since his 2020 International Booker shortlisted Mater 2-10 (tr. Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae), Hwang takes readers on a sweeping saga through six hundred years of Korean history, from a Joseon Dynasty monk experiencing a moment of enlightenment under the tree to Halmae witnessing Japanese soldiers using a beloved sapling for target practice. Grandma offers a moving look at the price of human greed and the hope that endures against all odds.The Cheerful Life of Lee Si-bong, Short and Struggle-Free by Lee Ki-hoMunhakdongne, 2025, 528 pagesThe Cut by Gu Byeong-moMunhakdongne, 2025, 352 pagesIn The Cheerful Life of Lee Si-bong, Short and Struggle-Free, the titular Lee Si-bong is a dog— a Bichon Frisé with a royal pedigree, to be exact. Lee Si-bong’s owner Lee Si-seup learns of his pet’s impressive lineage when a breeder named Michelle informs him that Lee Si-bong is one of only a few remaining “King Bichons.” Michelle offers a generous sum in exchange for the dog, assuring Lee Si-seup that she will provide only the most luxurious care and accommodations for his beloved companion. As he struggles to decide Lee Si-bong’s fate, Lee Si-seup makes a startling discovery that sheds light not only on the canine’s own past, but on the lives of his royal ancestors as well. Inspired by the author’s real-life dog, this immersive novel asks, “Do humans truly know what’s best for our animal companions?”The Cut tells the story of a woman who can read a person’s mind by touching their open wound. Enigmatic businessman Moon O-eon takes a penniless young woman under his wing, giving her a new name and life in a sprawling mansion where she reads people’s minds for him. She begins to develop complicated feelings for O-eon until one day, he commits an act of betrayal that shatters the tenuous trust between them. In a desperate attempt to make her understand him, O-eon asks her to read his thoughts. He, however, is the one person she refuses to read. In her characteristically propulsive style, Gu Byeong-mo weaves a complex tale that is at once a mystery, dark romance, and exploration of the basest instincts we keep hidden deep within.
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Reviews
[FRENCH] A Portrait of the Feminist as a Korean Woman
Translated into French as Le Monde selon Sisun, or “the world according to Sisun,” Chung Serang’s 2020 novel was published in France in 2024 by Charleston, an imprint of Éditions Leduc. As Charleston specializes in women’s fiction, feminist themes loom large throughout this story of the eponymous Shim Sisun, a female artist-turned-best-selling author. But its depiction of patriarchy in general, and in Korea in particular, is far from a straightforward denunciation. Chung, winner of the 2017 Hankook Ilbo Literary Award, does not spin a linear narrative. Instead of retracing the matriarch’s long career and tribulations across the continents, Chung weaves interesting voices into a multi-layered family saga. The portrait of Shim Sisun is reconstructed through excerpts from her books, interviews, and diaries, alongside the recollections of members of her family—her four daughters and her only son, and their spouses and children. Sisun has been dead for ten years. Her eldest daughter, Myeong-hye, decides that it is high time to commemorate their late mother in a proper fashion, although Sisun had always been an outspoken critic of ancestor worship and all things traditional. The ceremony will take place in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, where Sisun lived as a young woman and where her famous nude portrait by the German artist Mattias Mauer hangs in the Museum of Art. The ritual will be as original and idiosyncratic as the person who will be commemorated: each member of the Shim clan is to give an offering reflecting their personal relationship with Sisun—ranging from a special kind of food, to bits of volcanic rock collected off the soles of hiking boots, and delicious coffee beans. The trip to Hawai‘i becomes an excuse for a family reunion, and her five grandchildren offer an insight into South Korea’s youngest generation. The daughters of Myeong-hye, Hwasu, and Jisu, are opposite in character and represent two facets of contemporary womanhood south of the 38th parallel. Hwasu, still distressed after an acid attack at her office, is married to a loving man but is reluctant to have children in such a violent world; Jisu, a DJ, is a maverick not ready to settle down. Their cousin Uyun, the only child of Sisun’s son Myeong-jun, is a trained sculptor who works in Los Angeles where she designs monsters for the film industry. The other grandchildren are the son and daughter of Kyeong-a, Sisun’s youngest daughter (actually her stepdaughter, the daughter of her second husband). They are still schoolkids mirroring today’s topical issues both technological and environmental: Kyurim is the sporty tech-nerd type and Hyerim is obsessed with the welfare of birds. The throughline is, however, the homage to the free-spirited matriarch, a resilient modern Korean woman who fought to liberate herself from a male-dominated world and particularly the toxic machinations and abuse of her so-called mentor Mattias Mauer (nicknamed “M&M”). Mauer took her from Hawai‘i, where she had arrived as a mail-order bride, to Düsseldorf. There, she pursued her own career as a painter while also working as model for the German artist. The press, with racist innuendoes, depicted her as a manipulative Asian woman seeking money and fame. Fortunately, her life changed upon meeting the German-Sino-Malaysian art dealer Josef Lee, who truly loved her and followed her back to Korea, eventually becoming the father of Sisun’s children. Chung’s deft polyphonic construction is a tour de force. Every chapter starts with Sisun’s own words—a short excerpt from her fiction, memoir, or interviews—before focusing on the point of view of one of the many members of the Shim clan during this journey to Hawai‘i. The subtle depiction of the bond between the siblings is redolent of Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters. While the novel revolves around the matriarch, on a larger scale, it addresses the history of violence in the Korean Peninsula. Sisun had to flee to Hawai‘i after her family was massacred by nationalist soldiers who thought they were communists. Chung Serang delivers a beautiful portrayal of an extraordinary lady through a narrative that is both complex and fascinating.
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Reviews
[ENGLISH] The Openness of Being
The poetry of Oh Eun, winner of the Daesan Literary Award, is often celebrated for its imaginative wordplay and shifts in logic. From Being to Being, his first collection to appear in English, translated by Shyun Ahn, shows how playfulness can reveal new forms of understanding. “Whenever I’m writing poetry, I feel as though I’m always just about to arrive somewhere,” Oh said in a recent interview (KLN 68, 2025). The mood of continual arrival is clear from the beginning of “The Feeling of a Season,” the first poem in the collection: “I liked a corner / When I leaned on it / I became a waiting person.” Oh has said that the “effort at ‘becoming’ is one of the most important elements” of his poetry. In these lines, the speaker arrives into a new sense of himself as a person; in a flash, he has fully become one who is waiting. In Oh’s poetry, the swiftness of trans-formation—from being to being, from moment to moment—is matched by his preservation of not knowing. His poems are at once precise and porous, specific and open-ended. “I felt something disappear,” he writes later in the book’s first poem. The abstraction of “something” appears frequently in the collection (“I felt something in my hand,” “something couldn’t be grasped”). Its ambiguity shows Oh’s interest in the more general “feeling” of a season, or a life, not just its particulars. “In the end,” he writes, “the feeling is important. Feeling rich rather than being rich. Feeling alive rather than being alive.” From these feelings, the details that emerge can be startling and vivid (“when you open a mailbox, an eye”). Other times, Oh’s poetry resists particularity. This avoidance reflects his ambivalence about a world in which “literally nothing / works out magically / so a mind grows heavy.” Oh evades this heaviness by focusing on the possibility of further wonder. “In a moment my life will start anew,” he writes. His poems are invested in the “blanks” in which a beautiful “exception” may still arrive. Oh’s poetry is sometimes described as childlike, and the poems in From Being to Being often evoke childhood directly. They have the freshness of one who sees the moon as a “round thing,” of a child exploring the connections between their feelings and the world. But they also possess an adult understanding of the limits of feeling and the imagination. “No matter how angsty I was,” Oh writes, “something could never catch fire.” The volume is part of the Moon Country Korean Poetry Series from Black Ocean Press. The series includes English translations of contemporary Korean poetry by Moon Boyoung, Ha Jaeyoun, Pak Jeong-de, and many others. The book includes an insightful essay on Oh’s poetry by Kwon Hyeok-woong. Kwon suggests that for Oh, “play itself is a revolution,” and the essay itself is fittingly playful. It will also help a reader of English understand Oh’s intricate use of homonyms and homophones. In Ahn’s admirably lucid translation, those effects are sometimes invoked directly, as when “sole” clearly suggests “soul.” Often, they extend from Ahn’s inventive attention to idioms and repetition: “All the jarring things had become jars,” reads one line. “It wanted to hole up in the hole,” reads another. These repetitions also highlight Oh’s re-lation to the personal and personhood. “There are There are There are people,” he writes. In “The Feeling of a Season,” the poem’s speaker becomes a “waiting person”; across the collection, “person” often serves as both category and character. In the following lines, for example, the three statements can be read as describing one person, a series of people, or more general concepts: “a person who opens their eyes / a person who opens their ears / a person who starts reading.” In a review of Oh’s latest collection, Kim Un notes the “unstable mutability” of pronouns and other personal referents (KLN 68, 2025). That interest is clear in this volume, first published in 2016. “You are a third-person pronoun,” Oh writes, a delectable paradox that centers on the second-person pronoun “you.” Throughout From Being to Being, Oh shows his faith in whimsy and wonder, alongside his understanding that “all childhood dreams are silly dreams.” And yet, those dreams are purposeful and not easy to come by (“even a silly dream is hard to find when it’s needed”). His poetry focuses on the work it takes to keep possibilities open so that further magic might appear.
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Reviews
[ENGLISH] Dear Juhee Mun
Dear Juhee Mun, The only appropriate way to write this review is in letter form, addressed to you. Reading The Healing Power of Korean Letter Writing is akin to a revelation. I speak of the revelation of “the positive nature of human relationships—something we may have long since forgotten about, or perhaps have never had the chance to experience at all .” In an era permeated by social media and online hate, it is refreshing to read about what could positively reconnect us, as human beings, with our loved ones, lost relationships, strangers, and even ourselves. Well-balanced between storytelling and facts, your prose makes the book read like a conversation between friends. Each chapter provides us with step-by-step guidelines for letter writing . To some readers, all this insight might sound trivial, but I think it makes us wonder, “When was the last time I wrote a letter to someone?” That’s how much we have lost emotional touch with people and with letter writing. Consumerism and fast-paced life in big cities like Seoul make people feel disconnected from time. Nowadays, we are cogs in the machine, alienated from the idea of pausing the world and returning to slow life. Yet gifting time to ourselves or others is a form of love. As you mentioned in the book, not many people are willing to undertake the process of dedicating time to set the desk, choosing a specific pen, ink, and sheet of paper to match the recipient’s energy, and considering with precision the words that gush forth from the nib. Letter writing requires us to face ourselves. It involves digging deep into our memories, remembering the joyful moments shared with others and our deepest cuts. Dearest writer, while you critique our alienation from letter writing, you also remind us of our humanity by telling stories about letters. I enjoyed reading about the love and passion you poured into creating your stationery shop Geulwoll —a space for breathing that expands on the page, where strangers meet through pen pal letters. Thus, your book recounts your introspective experience of letter writing and it becomes an anthology of the experiences of other writers—famous writers like Park Wanseo and Franz Kafka, or random customers. It tells us about their motivations to write and the choices they made for their letter writing. There are many treasures in the unique letters and books sprinkled throughout your book. You leave room for significant details such as stamps, thereby transforming letter writing into a moment of authenticity that can appeal to today’s young generations. Juhee, your words make me feel seen and aligned with the person I am and want to be. Every year, I write a personal letter for my future self, jotting down my aspirations, my regrets, and the things I wish to remember on difficult days. This letter remains unopened for more than a year, until I feel the urge to read it. Intuitively, I search for the reassurance, the love, the care I put in it. Like yours, my words must be thought ahead, because chances are that these will save my future self. You write, Whenever I feel unsure of who I am as a person, I open up my box of letters. [ . . . ] Letters can’t help but hold a mirror up to ourselves. The person writing, the person reading and the person within the letter: all of them are ‘me.’ It is therefore impossible to finish reading your book, The Healing Power of Korean Letter Writing, and not want to write to someone we love. I may write to Clare Richards, the amazing translator behind the English version of your book. She introduced me to your work through an online letter, soon followed by an actual card and her beautiful English translation. Reading this book—that is, not only your words, Juhee, but also Clare’s translated words—was a gift of kindness I much needed this Christmas season. So I wish you to find in yourself the same kindness you showed us by writing this beautiful little book. When days feel gloomy, I hope this letter will find its way to you and give you the healing power you seek. Your faithful reader, Elisa
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Reviews
[ENGLISH] When Fantasy Refuses Consolation
After being falsely accused of sexually assaulting his stepsister Muhee, a sixteen-year-old boy flees his home in the middle of the night. With nowhere else to go, he slips into a small neighborhood bakery he once visited simply to quiet his hunger—only to discover that it secretly produces magical breads capable of granting wishes. As he hides there, he witnesses how people bend magic to serve their selfish desires and learns its limits through the baker and his assistant. While Gu Byeong-mo’s The Wizard’s Bakery is often framed as fantasy, the novel’s true subject is violence—how it is normalized, displaced, and quietly sustained within everyday life. Rather than staging violence as spectacle or moral rupture, Gu embeds it in ordinary structures: family hierarchy, institutional procedure, and social convenience. Violence in this novel does not arrive as a single catastrophic event. It accumulates. It settles into routines, habits, and expectations. Abuse unfolds through repeated gestures, unspoken rules, silences, and failures of intervention. By refusing to dramatize harm, the novel denies the reader the comfort of moral clarity. Violence is not something that happens and ends; it is something that continues because it is permitted to continue. The unnamed teenage narrator grows up entirely within this logic. His home is not ruled by overt villainy but by neglect, coercion, and procedural indifference. Authority figures— parents, teachers, police—rarely act with explicit malice. Yet their passivity is precisely what allows harm to persist. The novel does not invite the reader to locate evil in a single antagonist. Instead, it shows how violence becomes systemic when no one assumes responsibility for stopping it. Gu’s treatment of violence is therefore structural rather than psychological. The novel resists explaining trauma through emotional confession or therapeutic language. Instead, it reveals how violence becomes survivable precisely because it is normalized. The reader is never offered the catharsis of righteous anger. There is no decisive exposure that resolves the harm. Violence remains unresolved, ongoing, and consequential. Magic enters this world not as an antidote but as an extension of its ethical problems. The enchanted goods sold at Wizard’s Bakery are governed by rules, warnings, and disclaimers. Each product promises a specific effect, but each also demands accountability. Wishes are not innocent. They are transactions. By presenting magic as something purchased, agreed to, and consumed, Gu aligns it with systems of responsibility rather than escape. Magic does not remove the subject from the moral order of the world; it intensifies their involvement in it. Desire, once acted upon, binds the subject to consequences that cannot be undone or outsourced. This emphasis on responsibility distinguishes The Wizard’s Bakery from consolatory fantasy. Magical intervention does not absolve characters of guilt, nor does it repair damage without cost. On the contrary, spells function like contracts whose repercussions exceed the intentions of their users. The novel’s most unsettling moments do not arise from magical failure but from magical success. When spells work exactly as promised, the results are often unbearable. Gu thus reframes fantasy as an ethical test rather than a mechanism of wish fulfillment. Power is not presented as liberation but as exposure—exposure to consequence, complicity, and irreversibility. This severity is characteristic of Gu’s broader literary practice. Although she frequently draws on the conventions of genre fiction—fantasy, dystopia, crime—she does so without offering emotional cushioning. Her narratives refuse sugarcoated resolutions and redemptive arcs. Instead, they persistently unsettle. In The Wizard’s Bakery, the fantastical elements heighten rather than soften the novel’s cruelty, making ethical costs visible rather than implicit. Fantasy becomes a tool for reckoning rather than escape. Jamie Chang’s English translation plays a crucial role in carrying this tension across languages. The translation does not attempt to domesticate the novel’s harshness or reinterpret its silences. Chang resists explanatory embellish-ment and emotional smoothing, allowing gaps and ambiguities to remain operative. By declining to clarify what the original leaves unresolved, the English version preserves the novel’s ethical stance. The result is a translation that trusts its readers to endure discomfort and ambiguity. The Wizard’s Bakery remains, in English as in Korean, a novel that implicates rather than consoles.
