Kyung-ran Jo interview-event at the Korea Society (New York), July 15, 2025 [video]

[Peter]

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KYUNG-RAN JO INTERVIEW IN ENGLISH

Interesting news:

The Korea Society, New York, this week hosts an event with writer Kyung-ran Jo (조경란).

(Link below.)

She is the author of the RAS Korean Literature Club's August 2025 book, Blowfish .

Kyung-ran Jo has done very few interviews with English-speaking audiences. As best I can tell, she's done zero such interviews in the 2020s until now.

She is however now firmly in the spotlight. The worldwide launch of Blowfish is this very week. Official publication date" July 15, 2025.

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The Korea Society's upcoming event with Kyung-ran Jo looks to be pre-recorded.

If so, there won't be a live audience Q&A. (The Korea Society's events usually include audience Q&A; the events are generally more political in nature.)

If any hearty souls out there, among those who may be reading this, want to find out for sure if it's live or recorded, you can tune in at the announced start-time:

Seoul Time
-- Wednesday, July 16th, 6am

New York Time (U.S. East)
-- Tuesday, July 15th, 5pm

Link:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9T8x7Burw74

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Korea Society announcement page:

https://www.koreasociety.org/arts-cul...

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(Also shared with our hundred-plus-strong community by other means of communication.)
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[Peter]

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Anyone reading this who sees the Kyung-ran Jo "Korea Society" interview --- post here any reactions or comments. Share with us your views on it!

We are highly interested in Kyung-ran Jo, up until (at least) August 14, 2025, at which time a few dozen will gather at our usual meeting-place in Jongno, Seoul, to discuss her work and the new Blowfish in particular, and whatever great lessons her work may have to unlock life's (Korea's?) mysteries.

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(By coincidence, our August 2025 gathering will be on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the surrender of Japan and the snap plunging of uncertain-status onto the Korean Peninsula, which of course in important ways remains unresolved.

Koreans call August 15th Gwang-bok-jol (lit. Restoration-of-Light Day), an independence-like holiday which they share with countries across Asia (tied, famously, to the Japanese Emperor's broadcast, August 15, 1945, 12noon Tokyo time, announcing the surrender in his own voice).

The day after our August 14 gathering being a holiday, there will either more-than-usual or fewer-than-usual attendees. We'll have to see. But it's clear the 9pm push to get out the door and home will be weaker than usual, given that the following day is a holiday. The mood should be good, as usual. Join us, if you are in Korea.)
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[Peter]

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See also:

Links to short-stories by Kyung-ran Jo available in English translation (two available online freely; one a little harder to find):

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

[Peter]

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In the Korea Society interview, Kyung-ran Jo makes comments to the effect that from around late-August 2009 to December 2009 late-August 2008 to December 31, 2008 [UPDATE: See next comment for correction to timeline; I'll, however, leave the rest of this "as is"], she was an invited "visiting scholar" at Berkeley (the University of California at Berkeley; San Francisco Bay Area; UC-Berkeley).

She says she started writing Blowfish in earnest the very day she returned to Seoul from Berkeley. That's the account she's giving here in 2025.

She actually specifies the exact day she began writing (it's a memorable-enough date): January 1, 2010. She completed the writing of Blowfish in spring 2010; it was released on the South Korean book market in September 2010.

On one of my recent visits to the Kyobo Bookstore in Seoul (written about here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...), I read the short Author's Note for Blowfish. It's dated September 2010. She wrote in that Author's Note that she "began writing" Blowfish in fall 2009, and finished it in the spring of 2010; and that she'd struggled with the story for an unusually long time. There is no mention of UC-Berkeley in the Author's Note.

If the Author's Note and the Korea Society interview are to be reconciled as both true, I'd think it'd have to be about as follows:

The English translation of the Author's Note may have used the too-strong phrase "began writing" when something more like "began working on/through" had been mean; and that those late-2009 months in Berkeley did involve her "working" on the book but not through (much) pen-to-paper or fingers-to-keyboard methods. The late-2009 work was with ideas circulating in her mind.

What is good writing? We like to think it comes from good ideas, or good research; from inspiration, or interesting experiences, or observation-based insights into the human character. From something, from somewhere. Whatever that "something" was for her with Blowfish, it sounds like it came together (per these accounts) for her in, in her mind, in and around that Berkeley campus in the Fall 2009 semester. Maybe something about Berkeley itself inspired this depressing story.

In the Korea Society interview, Kyung-ran Jo says that she's spent much time abroad, on long visits and things -- including at least two long stays in the USA (Iowa, late 2004; a few years later, Berkeley, late 2009), but more in Tokyo than anywhere else in the world, from the sound of it. And she says that more-or-less every single time she's been away, for any sort of sufficient period to have some breathing room, she says something strange happens to her: A question comes up in her mind, a question which eventually overwhelms her and frightens or depresses her a bit. The question is:

----> "What am I doing here?"

Kyung-ran Jo suggests that she uses this feeling, whatever it is (existential dread?), as motivation for her writing.

The Author's Note for Blowfish opens with the following words, which I wrote in my phone as a note-to-self, just before returning the book to its (well-monitored) display-table:

"Sadness and beauty and fear and death -- I write about what overwhelms me. About what possesses me, about what doesn't let me go." ---- (Inspired by Berkeley?)
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[Peter]

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CORRECTION: Kyung-ran Jo was not clear in her interview --- but the UC-Berkeley time was actually late-August to December 2008, not 2009 (as I wrote above).

The correct timeline:

- ca. late-August 2008 to December 31, 2008: In Berkeley as an invited visiting scholar. The idea, inspiration, or drive, and "need" to write Blowfish coalesced in her mind in those months of late 2008 while in the USA.

- January 1, 2009: The day of her return to Korea. She resolved, by her account in the Korea Society interview, commit to the Blowfish project, a story she felt (has said) she needed to tell in order to continue on as a writer. A kind of New Year's Resolution. It didn't happen right away, as she was busy with other things (see, e.g., July 2009). It did eventually happen. The real writing begins about nine months after her return from UC-Berkeley.

- July 2009: Publication of her novel Tongue in English translation.

- ca. September 2009: Starts writing Blowfish in earnest.

- October 2009: interview with someone connected with the Korean Literature Now magazine; article finished and published ca. December 2009.

- Autumn 2009 to spring 2010: the writing of Blowfish, by her account in the Author's Note.

- September 2010: Blowfish original-Korean edition in the general-reader's hands (published), one year after writing began. (English-translation, July 2025).

I think this resolves the confusion I had on the timeline.

[Hannah]

Interesting. I wonder what about that opening to the author's note resonated with you enough to write it down as a note to yourself. I find the quote a bit mysterious, as I don't really know what it would be like to feel that way.

[John]

Peter wrote: ":
KYUNG-RAN JO INTERVIEW IN ENGLISH

Interesting news:

The Korea Society, New York, this week hosts an event with writer Kyung-ran Jo (조경란).

(Link below.)
" OMG Live talk at the Korea Society in NYC. This is no longer just promotion, this is serious dog and pony show.

I’m not sure who the driving force behind it is, but suspect whoever they are, they are doing it with a specific goal in mind. It’s not just to boost sales of the new translation, which I don’t think are likely to go very high, much less hit the break-through point from niche to general lit, (at least not now), but something much more strategic.

You mentioned the 2026 International Booker Prize, but it’s a juried international competition that draws strong contenders from around the world, and I think the chances of winning it are too low to justify the investment. (I’ve already expressed my opinion that winning the prize is the only thing that really matters and that getting into one or both of the the “lists” but not winning is of little importance except for die-hard followers of the IB and other prizes.)

Rather, I think it is connected to a phrase that I saw called out in one of the many pieces that popped up on the web the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature was announced – “who’s going to be the next Han Kang?” I can’t find the article anymore and don’t remember exactly what it said, but I don’t think it was anything as definite as “who’s going to be the next Korean winner of the Nobel Prize?” I think it was something more general, along the lines of “who are some of the Korean writers of recent generations (say born in after the Korean war) have what it takes to reach beyond Korea and connect with a world-wide readership in the way Han Kang has?”

How much are those who are promoting Jo Kyung-ran betting that she will be among those writers? I don’t know enough to be sure. She may just be the first of a whole series of bets they place in the next several years – or, to use some American sports slang, she may just be the first player of five or ten signed – in a strategic plan to reverse the decline of the “serious literary fiction” side of the national literary team and get it up to a respectable if not immediately world-class competitive level. It’s too soon to tell; we’ll just have to wait and watch what LTI Korea, Barbara Zitwer and maybe key publishers say and do in the coming months.

[EDIT] I found the "next Han Kang" article. I don't know if external html links work on GR these days, so I'll just give the title and leave it to those who are interested to google the article and read it form themselves:

HANKOREH

"At Frankfurt Book Fair, readers and publishers from across the world look for Korea’s next Han Kang"

Posted on : 2024-10-22 16:57 KST Modified on : 2024-10-22 16:57 KST

The "next Han Kang" section is easy to find, and says more or less what I guessed it did - maybe because I read it last week and still retain a ghost of a memory of it. :)