ONLINE: Angela Mi Young Hur

media release: A Room of One's Own welcomes Angela Mi Young Hur, author of the novel Folklorn (out now in paperback), for a virtual conversation on Crowdcast with acclaimed translators Anton Hur and Janet Hong!

Folklorn is a wondrous and necessary exploration of the myths we inherit and those we fashion for ourselves.

Elsa Park is a particle physicist at the top of her game, stationed at a neutrino observatory in the Antarctic, confident she's put enough distance between her ambitions and the family ghosts she's run from all her life. But it isn't long before her childhood imaginary friend—an achingly familiar, spectral woman in the snow—comes to claim her at last. Years ago, Elsa's now-catatonic mother had warned her that the women of their line were doomed to repeat the narrative lives of their ancestors from Korean myth and legend. But beyond these ghosts, Elsa also faces a more earthly fate: the mental illness and generational trauma that run in her immigrant family, a sickness no less ravenous than the ancestral curse hunting her. When her mother breaks her decade-long silence and tragedy strikes, Elsa must return to her childhood home in California. There, among family wrestling with their own demons, she unravels the secrets hidden in the handwritten pages of her mother’s dark stories: of women’s desire and fury; of magic suppressed, stolen, or punished; of the hunger for vengeance.

Angela Mi Young Hur received a B.A. in English from Harvard and an MFA in Creative Writing from Notre Dame, where she won the Sparks Fellowship and the Sparks Prize, a post-graduate fellowship. Her debut The Queens of K-Town was published by MacAdam/Cage in 2007. Folklorn was chosen by Kelly Link for a Tin House novel mentorship through the Tin House Summer Workshop, where Hur also studied with Alexander Chee and Mat Johnson, and later with Peter Ho Davies at the Napa Valley Writers Conference.

Anton Hur is a PEN Translates and PEN/Heim-winning translator of Korean literature. His translations include Violets and The Court Dancer by Kyung-Sook Shin, Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park, and Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung.

“Violets is an aching, atmospheric novel about grief and longing. Oh San, our main character, navigates a life of haunting loneliness and yet she finds tender moments of true beauty. In this slim and powerful book, Kyung-Sook Shin deftly explores the violence of life—of shedding childhood, of becoming a woman, of searching for identity in a shifting world. A beautiful translation by Anton Hur. Go read this book!” —Crystal Hana Kim, author of If You Leave Me

Janet Hong is a Vancouver-based writer and literary translator who has brought acclaimed Korean authors such as Han Yujoo and Ha Seong-nan to an Anglophone audience. Her recent translations include Lemon by Kwon Yeo-Sun, Bluebeard's First Wife by Ha Seong-nan, and Bad Friends by Ancco.

“Kwon is masterful at maintaining a low level of doubt…Hong’s translation is spare, lyrical…This narrative style mimics that of the whodunnit, dropping clues and red herrings along the way, but there are other, more compelling, mysteries we’re trying to solve…[a] shrewd diagnosis of a culture that disempowers women—commodifying and consuming them, one after another, until their appeal wears out.” —Vulture