Love in the Big City - Sang Young Park and Anton Hur in conversation

We are thrilled to welcome a star of Korean fiction, Sang Young Park,  and brilliant translator,  Anton Hur, as they discuss Love in the Big City – a fresh and unique debut novel, longlisted for the 2022 Internatioal Booker Prize.

Love in the Big City is about queers and Catholicism, women, abortion, STDs, and the socio-economic class divide in contemporary South Korea. It’s an energetic, joyful, and moving novel that depicts the glittering nighttime world of Seoul and the bleary-eyed morning after.

About the speakers:

Anton Hur was born in Stockholm, Sweden. He was double-longlisted for the International Booker Prize for his translation of Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City and Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny and longlisted for the inaugural National Book Critics Circle Awards Barrios Prize for Kyung-Sook Shin’s Violets. He also translated Baek Sehee’s international bestseller I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki and co-translated Beyond the Story: 10-Year Record of BTS. He also contributed to Tilted Axis’ anthology Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays in Translation (edited by Dr. Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang).

Sang Young Park was born in 1988 and studied French at Sungkyunkwan University. He worked as a magazine editor, copywriter, and consultant before debuting as a novelist. The title story of his bestselling short story collection, The Tears of an Unknown Artist, or Zaytun Pasta, was one of Words Without Borders’ most read pieces ever. He is the author of Booker International-longlisted Love in the Big City (translated by Anton Hur). He lives in Seoul.