Love in the Big City

Literature

with author San Young Park, translator Anton Hur and moderator Simon Lam

We are pleased to announce an in-person talk about the novel Love in the Big City with the author Sang Young Park and the translator Anton Hur.

A fresh and unique debut novel by the bestselling young star of Korean queer fiction, Love in the Big City is an energetic, joyful, and moving novel that depicts both the glittering nighttime world of Seoul and the bleary-eyed morning-after. In 2022, Sang Young was longlisted for the International Booker Prize alongside his translator, Anton Hur.

The event will be held at Korean Cultural Centre on the 21 July at 6 pm. Join us for a discussion about this book with the author and translator.

Love in the Big City

Young is a cynical yet fun-loving Korean student who pinballs from home to class to the beds of recent Tinder matches. He and Jaehee, his female best friend and roommate, frequent nearby bars where they suppress their anxieties about their love lives, families, and money with rounds of soju and freezer-chilled Marlboro Reds. Yet in time even Jaehee settles down, leaving Young alone to care for his ailing mother and find companionship in his relationships with a series of men, including one whose handsomeness is matched by his coldness, and another who might end up being the great love of his life.

Author Sang Young Park

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.

Translator Anton Hur

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 shortlisted 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).

Moderator Simon Lam

Simon Lam is a freelance writer and creative whose previous experiences include cultural marketing for brands within the music industry, political campaigning/advocacy and education policy. With a background that intersects East & South-east Asian, working-class and queer communities, his work and advocacy centres around highlighting the stories and creative contributions of marginalised people within culture.