Poets & Writers Theater

“The moment kids start to lie is the moment storytelling begins.” Young-Ha Kim delivers a TEDx Talk about all children beginning as artists, novel writing as a process of composing one sentence after another, and the value of a world in which everyone creates art, whether in public or in private. Kim’s story collection Diary of a Murderer (Mariner Books, 2019), translated from the Korean by Krys Lee, is featured in Page One in the May/June 2019 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“As a translator, you could do two thousand things right, but someone is going to notice the two things you do wrong, so it’s really an impossible art.” Krys Lee, whose translation from the Korean of Young-Ha Kim’s story collection Diary of a Murderer (Mariner Books, 2019) is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, talks about the inherent difficulties of literary translation.

“That was really one of my goals when I wrote the book, to create a human experience rather than the so-called North Korean experience for readers.” Author and translator Krys Lee speaks about her debut novel, How I Became a North Korean (Viking, 2016), and what she hopes to accomplish through her writing.