Author Talks: Yu Miri

October 24, 2023 - In 2020, beloved Zainichi Korean writer Yu Miri and prize-winning translator Morgan Giles won the National Book Award in Translated Literature for Tokyo Ueno Station, a deeply emotional and unflinchingly bold novel that highlighted the socioeconomic injustices and devastating human cost of modernization. Called “a creative genius” by the New York Times, Yu Miri was born to Korean parents in Japan and is famous for bringing a razor-sharp “outsider” perspective to her work, writing about those who have been pushed into the margins of society. She has over twenty books to her name, has received the Akutagawa (Japan's most prestigious literary award) and now, with a National Book Award under her belt, her popularity among English-language readers continues to grow.

The profound ways in which our history is never actually left in the past but is instead directly connected to our ever-moving present moment is the idea at the heart of Yu Miri’s astounding new novel, The End of August. Widely seen as Yu Miri’s most ambitious, most personal work, The End of August is a spellbinding multigenerational saga based on Yu Miri’s own family history, filled with death, love, betrayal, war, political upheaval, and ghosts. The story was deemed too controversial for print when it was first serialized in Japan in the early 2000s: Yu Miri was among the first to widely tell the stories of Korean comfort women among Japanese forces during WWII, and about the oppression that Koreans living under Japanese occupation endured. This is a groundbreaking epic from a singular, brilliant writer, comprised of fragmented sentences, dialogue written as if from a play, and streams of consciousness.

In this episode of Author Talks, Yu Miri discusses her career and the most recent translation of her novel.

Japanese Interpretation: Akiko Hikota

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