Korean Literature Night: Yun Ko-Eun in conversation with Sharlene Teo

Yona has been stuck behind a desk for years working as a programming coordinator for Jungle, a travel company specialising in package holidays to destinations ravaged by disaster. When a senior colleague touches her inappropriately she tries to complain, and in an attempt to bury her allegations, the company make her an attractive proposition: a free ticket for one of their most sought-after trips, to the desert island of Mui.

She accepts the offer and travels to the remote island, where the major attraction is a supposedly-dramatic sinkhole. When the customers who’ve paid a premium for the trip begin to get frustrated, Yona realises that the company has dangerous plans to fabricate an environmental catastrophe to make the trip more interesting, but when she tries to raise the alarm, she discovers that she has put her own life in danger.

Yun Ko-Eun is the author of several novels and short story collections published in Korea. Her short story ‘Piercing’ won the Daesan Literary Award for College Students the year she graduated from university. She received the 2008 Hankyoreh Literature Award for her novel The Zero G Syndrome and in 2015 her short story collection Aloha won the Kim Yong Ik Novel Prize. “The Disaster Tourist,” was named the winner of the Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger category, awarded by the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) in the UK in 2021.

Sharlene Teo is author of the novel Ponti (2018), which won the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writer’s Award. She is the recipient of the 2012 UEA Booker Prize Foundation scholarship, 2013 David TK Wong Creative Writing fellowship, 2014 Sozopol Fiction fellowship and 2017 University of Iowa International Writing fellowship.

Book cover image credit: designer Sinem Erkas, Publisher Serpent’s Tail