North Korean Literature in the News!

This past year has been a really rewarding one for us here at North Korean Literature in English. After years of toiling in obscurity, we are finally starting to see some international attention brought to this project.

Src: Politico

First, I have been able to reach out to several individuals – diplomats, reporters, and retired US military – who have actual named roles in North Korean historical novels. All have reacted with bemused chagrin to the translated excerpts I showed them, but after getting over the initial shock, they have really helped me to get a sense of the real historical circumstances behind the events and personalities depicted in the stories.

One such person is former CNN journalist Mike Chinoy, who has made numerous reporting trips to North Korea and was with the first American news team to broadcast live from Pyongyang. He was so amused to learn that he had a role a North Korean novel, he wrote an article about the experience which posted on CNN.

Then, last month I was able to get a portion of novelist/defector Kim Ju-song's memoir published in The Dial, with my own translation. Part of the excerpt covers his job at the Korean Writers' Union and their locked-up collection of forbidden foreign literature, which I previously blogged about. Kim's is one of the best-written defector memoirs I've ever read, and it really sheds light on the inner workings of North Korea's system of state-run literary production. I'm hoping this exposure will make it easier for us to find a publisher to translate the whole thing into English.