Notice of a book launch event as part of SOAS’s ongoing programme of Friday evening seminars:
Assorted Chatter about Mr.Y’s Literature
Byoung Yoong KANG (Writer & Assistant Professor, Department of Asian and African Studies, University of Ljubljana)
3 October 2014, 5:15 – 7:00 PM
Venue: Brunei Gallery | B102
Type of Event: Book LaunchAbstract
The lecture is on the sense of alienation of the characters appearing in Byoung Yoong Kang’s novels and short stories dealing with the time period of 21st century Korea. Kang often features the sense of alienation through characters such as ‘odd’ characters: a guy without balls, a guy without a nose, a rocker reincarnated, a Korean superman and so on. In this time, it is intended to analyse the character’s sense of alienation in Kang’s works and to talk about relationship between his characters and Korean society.
Biography
Born in Seoul in 1975, Kang graduated from Myongji University with a B.A. and M.A. in creative writing, also completing the coursework for a Ph.D. in the same subject. He also received a Ph.D. in Russian literature from Moscow State University. He debuted as a fiction writer when his short story The Winning Bid was selected in Spirit and Expression’s contest for new writers in 2002. Kang has published the story cycle Tales of Imaginary People (2005), the short story collection Inexhaustible (2006), a Russian-language study of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We (2010), the novel Assorted Records of the Castration of Mr. Y (2012), and the novel Aluminum Cucumber (2013), along with contributing a short story to the themed collection Kisses and Bananas (2014). Kang received a prize in the 8th contest for new translators of Korean literature in 2009, which was organized by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Since 2013, Kang works at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia as a Assistant Professor of Asian and African Studies.