This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Juhea Kim, whose novel City of Night Birds is out today from Ecco. The novel follows Natalia Leonova, a prima ballerina who returns to St. Petersburg in 2019, two years after a devastating accident stalled her dance career. Once a world-renowned dancer, she now turns to pills and alcohol to numb the pain of her past. As she wanders through her old city, ghosts of her former life appear: her loving but complicated mother, her absentee father, and the two talented dancers who led to her downfall. One of those dancers, Alexander, is the love of her life. The other is Dmitri, a dark and treacherous genius. When the latter offers her a chance to return to the stage in her signature role, Natalia must decide whether she can again face the people responsible for both her soaring highs and darkest hours. Kirkus Reviews called the book “[r]iveting…bold,” and “another brilliant page-turner from Kim” that is “a feast for the senses.” Vogue noted that City of Night Birds contains “[l]ush prose buttressed by vivid details…packed with drama, love affairs, and high-stakes rivalries.” Juhea Kim was born in Incheon, Korea, and moved to Portland, Oregon, at age nine. She graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Art and Archaeology and a certificate in French. An international best-seller, Kim’s debut novel, Beasts of a Little Land (Ecco, 2021), was a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. It won the 2024 Yasnaya Polyana Award, the largest annual literary prize in Russia, awarded by the Leo Tolstoy Museum-Estate. Kim donated the entire prize money to the conservation of Siberian tigers and Amur leopards. Kim is the founder and editor of Peaceful Dumpling, an online magazine covering sustainable lifestyle and ecological literature. She has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference and Regional Arts & Culture Council. Kim is based in London and Portland, Oregon.
Juhea Kim, author of City of Night Birds. (Credit: Jack Lee)
1. How long did it take you to write City of Night Birds?
It took a little less than two years, but in intense bursts because I was promoting my first novel, Beasts of a Little Land (Ecco, 2022), through most of that time. I just read my diary entry from Monday, March 13, 2023, that says, “finished the book Saturday night, sent it to Jody [my agent] yesterday morning. The moment I sent the email, couldn’t think or move.” I was bedbound for about four days, if I remember correctly.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I get asked this a lot and find it difficult to answer because writing isn’t the problem for me—it’s everything else surrounding it. For example, while writing this novel, I was planning my wedding. These days, my number one struggle is balancing my work and family life. It’s not that writing is easy, but that it is the very thing I want to be doing with my time.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I don’t have an office or even a desk at home, so I go to a café first thing in the morning to get my brain started. But once the prose is flowing, I write on the couch or the bed. At this point in my life, I don’t have a rule of writing every day, as I did for my first novel. Now, I’m lucky that I have the luxury of writing when I feel like it.
4. What are you reading right now?
Laurus (Oneworld Publications, 2016) by Eugene Vodolazkin.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I deeply admire Caroline Kim, who wrote The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), and Stacy D. Flood, who wrote The Salt Fields (Lanternfish Press, 2021), both of whom have been published by smaller houses. They are true artists.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Not having a desk or a bookshelf at home—I even keep books under the bed. Not having enough time in the day to do everything well and still take care of your family. I really wish I could feel pleasure in slowly cooking dinner, but I can’t—not while I have a dozen requests from publishers, for example. I struggle with guilt, which I think is so common to women writers.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
Honestly, I was told to go easy on the ballet stuff—in a ballet novel! When my editor and agent are so aligned in their feedback, I do listen. So I trimmed down the ballet scenes to make it more accessible to non-dancers, but because I get so much joy out of describing dance—both as an observer and a performer—most of it stayed. Then I was surprised by the early reviews (“brilliant page-turner,” “mesmerizing page-turner”) that seemed to say that the ballet stuff wasn’t boring and slow. I’m definitely relieved.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started City of Night Birds, what would you say?
I would say, everything will be fine. Stay the course.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of City of Night Birds?
I was doing ballet about an hour and a half to two hours a day, most days of the week while writing City of Night Birds. When I wasn’t dancing, I was listening to music or watching performances, both live and filmed. I was living and writing and breathing dance, and these different aspects merged into one creative act.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Describe your inner vision clearly so that the reader can see exactly what you see. I learned this in my junior year at Princeton from Professor Robert Bagley, an art historian and early Chinese art specialist. I use this principle every day in my writing life.
