How does it feel to be longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024, and what would winning the prize mean to you? Would it also have an impact on literature originating from your country?

I’ve been nominated for international literary awards a dozen times or so over the past 20 years, but I’ve never made it as far as winning the actual award. I figured this time would be the same. But for some reason I feel a little more excited about this one. Maybe it’s because I feel that I don’t have much time left, or because of my affection for this book, which I wrote while in seclusion during the pandemic in a part of the country that was unfamiliar to me. If I were to win this time, I think it would give me the fuel I need to complete the next three novels that I’ve been planning to write. Mater 2-10 was an effort on my part to recover the vestiges of the lives and struggles of ‘modern industrial workers’, who are among the most neglected figures, largely left out of post-colonial Korean literature. In that regard, it would have an impact.

What were the inspirations behind the book and how long did it take to write? What does your writing process look like?

The inspiration for this novel was an elderly gentleman I met during my visit to North Korea in March 1989, at the invitation of the Korean Federation of Literature and Arts. During the Japanese colonial occupation, he was a locomotive engineer who drove trains across the entire Korean peninsula, all the way up to Changchun in mainland China. He went north after the start of the Korean War.

My mother was born and raised in Pyongyang and attended vocational school in Japan. My father was from Hwanghae Province (North Korea) and attended vocational school in China. I was born in Changchun, Manchuria. After Japan’s defeat and Korea’s liberation in 1945, our family travelled south via Pyongyang, where my mother’s family had been living, and settled in Yeongdeungpo District in southwest Seoul in 1947. Yeongdeungpo was a modernized industrial district built under Japanese colonial rule. I lived there from the age of four to 16. It was such a memorable time for me, and yet later on when I tried writing fiction set in Yeongdeungpo, I was only able to manage a few short stories.

When I met the former locomotive engineer in Pyongyang, I was delighted to learn that his family had lived in the rail workers’ housing very close to where I’d grown up in Yeongdeungpo. I took copious notes at the time, as I knew I wanted to write about my memories of the place, his memories, and the life stories of the families of rail workers. I just had no idea it would take me over 30 years to do so.

Korea’s modernization lasted 30 years, starting in the colonial era and spanning across national division, civil war, and the post-war recovery period. This was when I became a novelist while also fighting against military dictatorship and struggling to secure creative freedom. Most of what I wrote during that time was on the theme of ‘overcoming and embracing modernity’.

My body of work can be divided into a first and second half in terms of form and content. The first half was characterised by Western realism, while the second half began with that fateful visit to North Korea in 1989, my five-year-long exile in Berlin and New York that followed, and my resulting five-year-long prison sentence and release in 1998. As the notes from my Berlin exile express: ‘If the world is changing and my writing is changing, too, then I should work to portray the world as it is through East Asian forms and narratives.’ Since then, I’ve done my best to incorporate traditional narrative forms originating from shamanic rituals, pansori performances, and folk tales and talk into my work. Mater 2-10 was an extension of that effort.

Beginning in 2018, I spent a year doing research and conducting interviews. I began writing in the spring of 2019 and completed the novel in the summer of 2020. The last time I wrote a novel by hand was Jang Gil-san, a 12-volume epic written between 1974 and 1984. It was such an ordeal that I never attempted writing a novel by hand again. Sometime in the mid-80s, some fellow writers I knew urged me to try using an electric typewriter; after that came a word processor that I used for three years. Then, in Berlin in 1990, I got my first computer – a Macintosh with a Korean word processing program installed on it – and have been keeping pace with the development of home computers ever since.

Although my working style changes with each new writing project, I think my process is similar to that of an architect. Once I decide on a type of building, I draw up a rough blueprint, then a more detailed blueprint, then I lay the foundation and begin construction. I change up the interior as I go along. Other times, the work progresses the way a tree grows: I start with a big line for the trunk, and the roots and branches develop as I go.

What was the experience of working with the book’s translators like? How closely did you work together on the English edition? Were there any surprising moments during your collaboration, or joyful moments, or challenges?

I’ve worked with translators from all different languages. For the most part they email me lists of questions, and I do my best to provide careful and detailed answers. I have a lot of faith in my translators and rarely object to their decisions. The translators I’ve been partnered with are all experts in their field; they’ve earned awards for their work and have translated other famous works. So I respect their opinions, as well as the opinions of the publishers or organizations that recommend them to me.

Tell us about your reading habits. Which book or books are you reading at the moment, and why?

I’ve moved around quite a bit since the pandemic: after 2019, I left Seoul and moved to a small town in the provinces, then in 2021, after finishing Mater 2-10, I moved to a suburb of Seoul, and again last year, I moved to a port city on the southwest coast. The city is in the process of building a memorial hall for me, where I also plan to reside, starting this summer. Because of all this moving around, my books have been slumbering away inside of several moving containers. Now that construction is almost done, I’ll be able to set up my new library. Nowadays I rely on reading glasses or even a magnifying glass, following my cataract surgery. But while my reading speed has slowed down, I read more closely now. Reading is a daily pleasure, along with taking walks.

During the pandemic, I read all of the poetry collections that I’d been waiting to read, and started re-reading Buddhist scriptures. Most recently, I’ve been perusing the 70-volume Compendium of Korean Oral Literature, which was an important achievement of the modernization era. It contains over 60,000 orally-transmitted folk tales. I’m also working on a collection of Korean folk tales for children, which I plan to complete by next year.

The last book I finished was Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King. It combines traditional oral storytelling with a modern narrative style. King, who is of Cherokee descent, uses this technique to weave together the characters’ stories with Native American mythology and contemporary life.

I also read a collection of Korean narrative shaman songs. One of the books I plan to write is about a six-hundred-year-old hackberry tree on a remote corner of the coast on the outskirts of this port city. It was the guardian tree for a fishing village whose population tripled in size to 3,000 during the dynastic era. But under Japanese colonialism, the Japanese army built an airfield there, followed by the US military who used it as an airfield and missile base. The old fishing village disappeared, and the hackberry tree has remained trapped inside the barbed wire of the base. My plan is to write a lyrical novel centred on this tree. I’m hoping to also incorporate techniques of narrative shaman songs.

What was your path to becoming a reader – what did you read as a child and what role did storytelling play in your younger years? Was there one book in particular that captured your imagination?

I learned Hangul, the Korean alphabet, and was reading books before I started school. My mother was the one who introduced me to books and bought them for me. She was a teacher at an all-girls’ school. But no sooner did I start school than the Korean War began; we were moving constantly to different safe places. Despite the difficulties of living as refugees, my mother still managed to buy me books, like Gulliver’s Travels, Andersens’ Fairy Tales, Poor Blaise (Pauvre Blaise) and Heart (Cuore). After we returned to our home in Yeongdeungpo, I became acquainted with the book stalls in the night market. These book stalls were a type of library where people would take the bookshelves from their homes and set them up in the market. You would deposit a certain amount of money in exchange for borrowing their books. My older sisters and I read every book in those makeshift libraries. I read everything I could get my hands on, regardless of whether they were meant for adult readers and whether they were ‘proper’ or ‘popular’ literature. The books that left a lasting impression on me back then were Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, and Alexander Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. In middle school, I read Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, among others.

In high school, I became more systematic with my reading and focused on Western and Eastern classics. This included 19th-century European novelists, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, and so on, as well as 20th-century writers whose work was collected in anthologies of so-called ‘world literature’ at the time.

I wrote my first essay in the fourth grade, for a composition class. It was about returning home after the war to find our neighbourhood bombed and home half-destroyed. I wrote about my mother pulling broken dishes and plates from the rubble, and finding my school books buried in the dirt. The essay was called ‘Homecoming Day’. My teacher submitted it to a nationwide writing contest for elementary school students; it won top prize and was published in the newspaper. It was the first time I’d been praised so heavily for my writing. While the other kids talked about wanting to grow up to become firefighters, police officers, military generals, and so on, I started saying I wanted to be a writer, even though I didn’t really know what that meant.

But my true start came in middle school, and I began working on my first novel in high school. When I was 19 and in my third year of high school, I won the New Writer Award from ‘Sasanggye’ and suddenly became a writer.

Tell us about a book that made you want to become a writer. How did this book inspire you to embark on your own creative journey, and how did it influence your writing style or aspirations as an author?

There are so many that I can barely remember them all. But the ones that stand out to me are Moby Dick and Don Quixote, among others. These books affected me at different points in my life. I’d tried and failed to read Moby Dick several times, but when I was stationed in Vietnam, I finally read it all the way through and was deeply moved. It was right after the Tet Offensive; we were stuck at a US base for two weeks before we could return to our own base, and it turned out to be the sweetest, most peaceful R&R. That copy of Moby Dick had been sent by a friend of mine from college along with a copy of Dostoevsky’s Demons. I’m pretty sure those copies are long gone from where I left them behind in Vietnam. Anyway, after reading Moby Dick, I decided that I just had to make it back alive and keep writing stories of my own. As for Don Quixote, I’ve read it three times so far: in high school, during my exile in Berlin, and during a Won Buddhist residency in the summer of 2018 when I was preparing to write Mater 2-10. I’d like to think of Miguel de Cervantes as a mentor, always boisterously cheering me on to become a writer.

Tell us about a book originally written in Korean that you would recommend to English readers. How has it left a lasting impression on you?

I guess I’ll take this opportunity to recommend one of my own books, The Guest. It was published in 2000 on the 50th anniversary of the Korean War. The idea for the book first came to me when I was in exile in Berlin and witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall – which was in turn the beginning of the end of the global Cold War system. In Hwanghae Province in North Korea is the Sinchon Museum of American War Atrocities, which memorializes a massacre of civilians by the US military. Naturally I was taken there during my visit to the North.

But the truth of the Sinchon Massacre is that it was committed ‘amongst ourselves’: a mutual massacre between Protestant and communist villagers. That internalised guilt and fear formed the root of the fanatical hatred between North and South Korea that continues to this day. It was both a civil war and an international war that would contribute to the Cold War. After publishing that book, I was attacked by nationalists on both sides of the border.

I had been working on the book – doing research and collecting eyewitness stories – when I returned from exile and was promptly imprisoned. I had to pause that work, but it turned out to be a good thing, as it gave me time to allow my ideas to mature and to try out different approaches. Both Christianity and Marxism can be seen as forms of modernity that were acquired by relying on others rather than achieving modernization spontaneously, while undergoing colonisation and division. In a sense, North Korea, which had fewer remnants of traditional class society to deal with compared to the South, enthusiastically embraced both ideologies as ‘enlightenment.’ In other words, they were two branches with one root.

I was inspired by the way the people of late Joseon, who recognized smallpox as a Western disease, created a shamanic healing ritual for it called ‘Sonnim Gut,’ or ‘Ritual for a Guest’. In the book, I defined Christianity and Marxism in the same way: as ‘guests,’ or the opposite of the host. The novel essentially features a ritual called Haewon Gut, which reveals the scars of a nightmarish massacre that lasted for fifty days. I referred to the twelve parts of the Hwanghae-do Jinogi Gut, in which the spirits of the dead are guided to a better place. Just as in the shamanic ritual itself, the living and the dead appear together and move back and forth between past and present, each telling their own stories and recollections. The goal was to weave together the weft of ‘time travel’ to the past with the warp of ‘oral narrative’ to create a tapestry that would portray each character’s experience and perspective.

If it’s true that the remnants of memory grow stronger the more we try to forget how they were created, then neither the living nor the dead can ever be truly free of the ghosts of the past. However, those ghosts are not just hallucinations but are very real in the sense that the tragedies of war are the burden of history passed down to us as a karma that must be resolved. And in some parts of the world, these tragedies are still happening.

How does it feel to be shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024 – an award which recognises authors and translators equally – and what would winning the prize mean to you?

It’s thrilling to be longlisted for the International Booker Prize, and I’m especially delighted to get to share this experience with Youngjae [Josephine Bae], who co-translated the book with me.

How long did it take to translate the book, and what does your working process look like?

The book took about a year to translate. I translated the first two chapters as a sample for the agent and publisher; then after signing a contract with the publisher, Youngjae and I divided the remaining chapters, with her taking the first batch and me taking the latter so that I could enjoy a brief maternity leave. After drafting our chapters, we swapped pages and revised, commented, discussed, and talked and talked and talked until we were both happy with how it all looked.

Do you read the book multiple times first? Do you translate it in the order it’s written?

I normally translate novels in the order in which they’re written, but in this case I jumped from the beginning of the book to the middle. I mostly read as I translated, and re-read the book many times over the course of drafting, revising, and editing.

Aside from the book, what other writing did you draw inspiration from for your translation?

I looked at a variety of different texts, from other historical novels to folktales and song lyrics, for inspiration.

What was your path to becoming a reader – what did you read as a child and what role did storytelling play in your younger years? Was there one book in particular that captured your imagination?

I was a typical bookworm as a child, always with a book (or two or three) in my hand. I would even read while riding my bike, which, looking back on it now, was such a terrifyingly bad idea. I read whatever I could get my hands on, but was especially fond of fantasy novels as a younger reader and gothic and horror novels later on as an older reader.

Tell us about your path to becoming a translator. Were there any books that inspired you to embark on this career?

Before I became a translator, I wrote poetry and was interested in hybrid forms, like prose poetry and lyrical essays. At the same time I was reading Korean fiction for fun. A friend suggested I try out for The Korea Times annual translation contest, and that experience started me on the path to becoming a professional literary translator.

What are your reading habits under normal circumstances? Which book or books are you reading at the moment, and why?

When I’m not in the middle of a translation project, I like to read all kinds of things. At the moment, I’m on a memoir kick, most recently Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know and E.J. Koh’s The Magical Language of Others. Thanks to my kids, I’ve also been reading more children’s literature. They prefer dinosaurs and dump trucks, but I prefer folklore, ghost stories, and picture books that capture the sweetness of daily life.

Tell us about a book originally written in Korean that you would recommend to English readers. How has it left a lasting impression on you?

Magic Candies, cleverly written and illustrated by Heena Baek and beautifully translated by Sophie Bowman, is a tremendously touching book about a shy boy who buys a bag of magic candies that enable him to communicate with the world around him. The scene where he understands the truth behind his father’s nagging stayed in my head for a long time after.

Which work of translated fiction do you wish you had translated yourself, and what aspects of this particular work do you admire most?

I don’t know that I’ve thought of any particular translation this way! Knowing how much time and effort goes into any translation, I’m just always grateful to other translators for the work they do.

Do you have a favourite International Booker Prize-winning or shortlisted novel and, if so, why?

I honestly can’t choose just one as a favourite.

What role do you think translated fiction plays in promoting a more inclusive and diverse literary canon, and how can we encourage more people to read it?

I think translated fiction is important for going beyond culture as content to broadening our expectations and understandings of style, voice, and narrative. As for how to get people to read more translations, I wish I knew!

How does it feel to be longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024 – an award which recognises authors and translators equally – and what would winning the prize mean to you?

It’s such an honour to be longlisted and to share the honour with Sora, a translator I respect so much, makes the experience all the more special! I’ve never dreamed of being longlisted so I can’t even begin to imagine what winning the prize would mean for me.

How long did it take to translate the book, and what does your working process look like?

It took about a year for us to translate the book. Sora had already done the first two chapters as a sample for the author’s agent, so I jumped in from the third chapter. We ended up doing an equal number of chapters, and once our drafts were ready, we swapped them and embarked on a long series of discussions as we revised the manuscript again and again until we decided we were done.

Did you read the book multiple times first before translating it? Do you translate it in the order it’s written?

I read the book as I translated it, but I naturally ended up combing through the book many times as we continued to revise our translation. I usually translate books in the order they’re written, and for Mater 2-10, I read Sora’s translation of the first two chapters before I started working on the third chapter.

Aside from the book, what other writing did you draw inspiration from for your translation?

I browsed through some historical novels as well as reference works and articles covering periods similar to the book.

What was your path to becoming a reader – what did you read as a child and what role did storytelling play in your younger years? Was there one book in particular that captured your imagination?

I have loved all kinds of stories since as long as I can remember. My love for fantasy began with Korean folk tales like The Tale of Sim Chong and English fairy tales like Jack and the Beanstalk. My love for mystery began with the Nancy Drew series and Agatha Christie books. When it comes to historical fiction, I think it began with the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, some of which are still sitting on my bookshelf.

Tell us about your path to becoming a translator. Were there any books that inspired you to embark on this career?

In college, a friend asked if I’d like to come along and take a test for a part-time translating job at a Korean newspaper company. I got the job but only managed to keep it for six months until I was laid off with a bunch of others on the team. That was how I first set foot on the path to becoming a translator. I did wander off course a few times, but I’d always find myself back on track somehow, so now I’m guessing fate had a little something to do with it. One of those times when I wandered off course, I happened to read the English edition of Please Look After Mom written by Kyung-sook Shin and translated by Chi-young Kim. It was the first work of translated Korean fiction that I’d read, but at the time, I never imagined that I’d be translating fiction myself one day.

What are your reading habits under normal circumstances? Which book or books are you reading at the moment, and why?

I don’t know why, but I like to read on a subway or train. I’ve recently begun to read A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize. The reason I’m reading the book is because it was a gift from my cousin. Last year, I finally got around to a book my dad had given me, which was Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, and I loved the humor and the advice it offers on writing and life.

Tell us about a book originally written in Korean that you would recommend to English readers. How has it left a lasting impression on you?

‘Myongdu’ is a short story by Gu Hyo-seo and I believe the title of its bilingual edition is Relics translated by Michelle Jooeun Kim. The tale’s protagonist is an old tree that’s been dead for the past twenty years and it tells a heart-wrenching story about a woman who had to bury three of her dead children under the tree. There’s an especially chilling description about how relics are made out of children that still haunts me to this day.

Which work of translated fiction do you wish you had translated yourself, and what aspects of this particular work do you admire most?

I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way about any translation, although I often find myself wishing that I’d done something differently when I look at any translation I did in the past.

Do you have a favourite International Booker Prize-winning or shortlisted novel and, if so, why?

I must admit that I’ve read very few of the books that have either won or have been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. That’s why I’ve recently ordered A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk, which I’ll probably enjoy as much as I did My Name is Red.

What role do you think translated fiction plays in promoting a more inclusive and diverse literary canon, and how can we encourage more people to read it?

I think translated stories set in an unfamiliar background, told in a different literary style, yet exploring universal themes can entertain and broaden the minds of readers just as much as stories written in their original language. Although I don’t have any good ideas on how to encourage more people to read translated fiction, I believe awards like the International Booker Prize are important in helping translated fiction gain the attention it needs.