AAWWTV: An Evening with Han Kang & E. Tammy Kim

Join us for a rare American visit by Han Kang, one of the most prominent novelists in contemporary world literature. Han’s first book, The Vegetarian (Hogarth 2016)--a phantasmagoric fable about a wife whose carnivorous renunciation disrupts her marriage in ways whose consequences are ultimately grotesque--won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. Shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, her newest book, The White Book (Hogarth 2019), a woman at a writer’s residency in snow-covered Warsaw meditates on the color white as a way of processing traumas that have haunted her family. Moderated by former AAWW Fellow E. Tammy Kim, a contributor to The New Yorker and New York Times Magazine.
Co-sponsored by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI).
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AAWW is a national not-for-profit arts organization devoted to the creating, publishing, developing and disseminating of creative writing by Asian Americans-in other words, we’re the preeminent organization dedicated to the belief that Asian American stories deserve to be told.
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Our curatorial platform is premised on the idea of a big-tent Asian American cultural pluralism. We’re interested in both the New York publishing industry and ethnic studies, the South Asian diasporic novel and the Asian American story of assimilation, high culture and pop culture, Lisa Lowe and Amar Chitra Katha, avant-garde poetry and spoken word, journalism and critical race theory, Midnight’s Children and Dictee. We are against both an exclusive literary culture that believes that race does not exist and Asian American narratives that lead to self-stereotyping and limit the menu of our identity. We are for inventing the future of Asian American literary culture. Named one of the top five Asian American groups nationally, covered by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Poets & Writers, we are a safe community space and an anti-racist counterculture, incubating new ideas and interpretations of what it means to be both an American and a global citizen.

[@hfav2010]

What a wonderful interview with my favorite writer! The student who wrote a senior thesis on Han Kang’s books asked excellent questions at the end of the session (at circa 1.21.00). Since I admire Han Kang’s writing as much as she does, I would be very interested in reading her thesis if it’s available. If you happen to see this comment, please let me know, and I will share my email address. Hans from the Netherlands

[@xoxo-dr8df]

Actually Han Kang's speaks English well. She can manage without an interpreter just like what she did for her interviews at Foyles UK. She can also read her books in English.

[@davidsheriff9274]

I don't know this for sure, but my guess might be that the reason she doesn't want to read the English translated version is because she doesn't think of it as "her" book. A translation, no matter how close it might be to the original text,is in many ways the translator's interpretation of the original text, so Han Kang wants to read her book, not someone else's interpretation of her book. Also, the translator of The White Book Deborah Smith received a lot of criticism for her translation of The vegetarian.