Author Talk with Kyung-Sook Shin
Kyung-Sook Shin, author of Please Look After Mom and I Went to See My Father will read from her work and discuss her fiction. Prof. Christopher Hanscom in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures will moderate.
Monday, October 26, 20264:00 PM
Room 10383, Bunche Hall
Please Look After Mom, the story of a family searching for a mother who goes missing in a crowded Seoul subway station, became a New York Times bestseller and brought contemporary Korean fiction to readers around the world. In I Went to See My Father, Shin turns to the other parent: a daughter returns to her hometown to stay with her aging father and comes to know the life he carried in silence.
Drawing on Please Look After Mom and I Went to See My Father, Shin will talk about the Korean family at the heart of her fiction. The program includes a reading in Korean with its published English translation, a conversation about Korean words for family and everyday life and how they are translated, and a look at how readers around the world have responded to her work.
Kyung-Sook Shin was born in Jeongeup, South Korea, and made her literary debut in 1985. Her novels include Please Look After Mom, The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness, I'll Be Right There, The Court Dancer, Violets, and I Went to See My Father. Please Look After Mom, translated by Chi-Young Kim, became a New York Times bestseller, has been published in more than 40 countries, and in 2012 made Shin the first Korean writer and the first woman to win Man Asian Literary Prize. Her honors also include Frances's Prix de I'lnaperçu and, in Korea, the Yi Sang Literary Award and the Ho-Am Prize in the Arts.
Christopher Hanscom is a professor of modern Korean literature in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. He is the author of Impossible Speech (2024) and The Real Modern (2013), as well as coeditor of The Affect of Difference (2016) and Imperatives of Culture (2013).
koreanstudies@international.ucla.edu
Sponsor(s): Center for Korean Studies, Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, King Sejong Institute Center, USA, Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles
