Linkfest 2018: Tooting My Own Horn

2018 was a banner year for us here at the North Korean Literature in English project. I published several articles related to the blog project and had the opportunity to present my work at several forums.

In January I published a short article with The Conversation introducing the blog project. That article caught the attention of someone who got me connected with the good folks at Global Asia, who invited me to do a longer feature article with them that was published in June.

Talking at GWU Elliot School

Meanwhile, in March I traveled to Washington DC to present a research paper based on the blog project at the Association for Asian Studies annual conference, then crossed town to GWU to present at the "Beyond the Nuclear Issue in North Korea" conference sponsored by the National Committee on North Korea and the GW Institute of Korean Studies. It was a thrill for me to meet many scholars working in various areas of North Korean society and culture.

My big week in DC yielded an invite to submit to the Korea Economic Institute's Academic Paper Series. Working with KEI helped me to put my research into a policy-oriented context for the first time, and I'm pretty proud of the resulting paper. In early December I again flew to DC to present the paper for KEI's lecture series and also did an episode of their Korea Kontext podcast (forthcoming).

Meanwhile, the project expanded further into multimedia in December when the USC Korean Studies Institute produced an interview with me as part of their YouTube series. They made me look good!

All this in a year when I also finished my Ph.D., moved to a different country, and started a new job! And continued translating North Korean works of fiction in various coffee shops and pubs around Tokyo. It's been quite a year.

I'd like to extend my gratitude to the many people who have supported this project by liking, retweeting or sharing my posts. I'd also like to thank the managers of the dprktoday website, who have made an increasing amount of North Korean literature available for free online. And finally, I would be remiss if I did not offer a very sincere thank-you to the hardworking North Korean fiction writers, without whom this project would not be possible. I know that writing is not easy even under the best of conditions, and I hope that my translations have done justice to your work.