Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, her first novel to be published in English, is a haunting, startling and poetically rendered story about shame, alienation, rage, metamorphosis and desire in present-day South Korea. I meet her, with translator Deborah Smith and interpreter Kyeong-Soo Kim, to discuss its themes of identity and humanhood. MR: The Vegetarian was published...
Gong Ji-young is at the forefront of the new wave of women writers who rose to the top of the literary tree in Korea in the 1980s and ’90s. We meet a few months after the UK publication of Our Happy Time, her invigorating tale of victimhood, love and redemption, on the eve of her...