

How Korean writer Don Mee Choi's work challenges borders and historical narratives
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Despite the craze for Korean literature in India, you’d be hard-pressed to find an Indian fan who knows of Don Mee Choi. She writes poetry, not fiction.
She translates as much as she writes. And her poetry offers no easy resolution; it is fragmentary, interdisciplinary and reckless with literary convention.The 63-year-old—who has won a pantheon of literary honours, including a Whiting Award, a National Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur “genius grant”—was in Mumbai in April for the Almost Island Dialogues, an annual series of literary conversations among prominent writers from around the world.
She spoke with Lounge about her work, the popularity of Korean literature, and how her own preoccupations might find consonances in a place like India.Although Choi’s poetry is tethered to Korea’s past and present, she would be wary of her work being lumped under the banner of “Korean Literature”—not because she left South Korea as a child owing to the military dictatorship (first for Hong Kong, then the US, and now Germany where she resides), but because she refuses the politics of power embedded in such formulations.When I ask about the “K-Wave” in literature, she laments that an earlier generation of Korean writers who wrote under dictatorship have failed to be recognised in English translation. “They risked their lives writing!” she says.
Read on livemint.com