London Korean Links

Covering things Korean in London and beyond since 2006

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Selected publications

  • Booklist: Short Stories (372 titles)
    • Festival Film Review: This Road Called Life

      Following on from the success of their feature-length animation Green Days, Studio MWP worked with Korean TV broadcaster EBS to produce a trio of short films which adapt three familiar short stories which are studied by most Koreans in high school: Yi Hyo-seok’s Buckwheat Season, Kim Yu-jeong’s Spring, Spring, and A Lucky Day by Hyun … [Read More]

      Bringing Kim Hoon’s Hwajang to the big screen: How to act a swollen prostate?

      Im Kwon-taek set himself quite a challenge when he decided to make a movie of Kim Hoon’s Hwajang. It is a dense, concentrated and rich piece of writing – I hesitate to say “short story”, because really there’s not much narrative flow. Instead, there’s well-balanced contrast; there’s inner thoughts and emotions; there are the human … [Read More]

      Get your translated Korean literature for free on your iPad

      Thanks to Charles Montogomery at KTLit.com for spreading the word on this free resource available on iTunes, courtesy of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Chae Man-sik, Yi Sang, Yi Kwang-su and others are represented in the 19-story collection, with more to come later this year. It’s a nice-looking app, with added SNS capabilities. Here’s … [Read More]

      Jeonju Film Fest to focus on Kim Young-ha

      This is the kind of news I like. This year the program of the Jeonju International Film Festival will include “short films based on Korean writers’ short stories, thereby creating opportunities for good Korean literature to be introduced overseas. The focus this year will be KIM Young-ha. KIM Young-ha’s novel, I have a right to … [Read More]

      Book review: Modern Korean Literature — An Anthology 1908-65

      Modern Korean Literature: An Anthology 1908-1965 Edited by Chung Chong-wha Routledge / Kegan Paul International, 1995, 467pp If you are looking to sample Korean literature in translation, the chances are that you’ll find more short stories than full length novels. This collection, though not universally enjoyable, is extremely useful in giving an overview of the … [Read More]

      A Yi Mun-yol short story in the New Yorker

      A Yi Mun-yol short story (An Anonymous Island) is published in The New Yorker — a first! wp.me/p1mFzB-cJ. Via @subjobjverb. Translation is by Heinz Insu Fenkl. Update: LKL article on the short story and Im Kwon-taek’s screen adaptation of it (Village in the Mist – 안개 마을, 1983) can be found here. [Read More]