POHANG, May 26 — A head pops out of the toilet, a woman gets pregnant from birth control pills — South Korean Booker Prize nominee Bora Chung’s short stories are full of horror, inspired by her own lonely life.
Only two South Korean writers — Han Kang and Hwang Sok-yong — have previously been nominated for the honour, and both were far more established and well regarded domestically.has not won any prizes in South Korea, and Chung mostly earned a living teaching at a university and translating Russian literature.
“I wasn’t sure if anything was actually waiting for me in South Korea even if I wanted to return,” she said. Her characters include a father who locks up his daughter and exploits her for business, a designer who falls in love with a robot companion she’s invented and a woman who is constantly shamed after becoming pregnant due to the side effects of birth control pills.
“To me, it was horror,” she told AFP at her apartment in the South Korean port city of Pohang before leaving for the United Kingdom to attend the awards ceremony set for Thursday. “I did everything I could to promote the book, whether it was on social media, at Oxford University where I won a translator’s residency... and the many literary festivals I dragged the author to so that we could sell just one more book,” he told AFP.
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