Korean-American Poet Choi Don-mi and Korean-Japanese Novelist Yu Miri Win American Book Awards

[Asia Economy Reporter Park Byung-hee] Korean American writer Don Mee Choi and Korean Japanese writer Yu Miri received the National Book Awards this year.

This is the first time a Korean-descended writer has won the prestigious National Book Awards in the American publishing literary world. Last year, Susan Choi, born to a Korean father and Jewish mother, won the fiction category for her work "Trust Exercise."

At the 71st National Book Awards ceremony held online on the 19th (Korean time) by the National Book Foundation, Don Mee Choi was selected as the poetry category winner for her poetry collection DMZ Colony, and Yu Miri was selected as the translation literature category winner for translating Tokyo Ueno Station, originally titled "JR Ueno-eki Koen Deguchi."

Born in Seoul, Don Mee Choi emigrated and is currently active as a poet and translator in Seattle. She translated Kim Hyesoon’s poetry collection Autobiography of Death, winning Canada’s Griffin Poetry Prize and the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize from the American Literary Translators Association. She received the Lucien Stryk Prize again for translating Kim Hyesoon’s poetry collection Trash of the World, Unite!

The award-winning work DMZ Colony is a poetry collection that looks at the tragic reality of a divided nation through the subject of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) along the armistice line, including stories of long-term prisoners of conscience and her father.

Poet Choi Don-mi (right) and poet Kim Hye-soon

Novelist Yu Miri [Photo by Yonhap News]

Yu Miri is a mid-career figure in Japanese literature who won the Akutagawa Prize, considered Japan’s highest literary honor, in 1997 for her novel Family Cinema. She is also well known to Korean readers through works such as Tile, Rouge, and Beyond August.

Yu Miri’s nationality is uncertain. While some say she is a Korean Japanese with Japanese nationality, in an interview with a Korean daily in August 2018, she stated that she is a "Korean resident in Japan" and has no intention of changing her Korean nationality. At the online awards ceremony, she dedicated her honor to the residents affected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Tokyo Ueno Station is a novel that depicts the harsh reality of the city through the spirit of a man who died living as a homeless person near Ueno Station and still wanders the area. It was published in Korea in 2015 by Giparang under the title Ueno-eki Koen Deguchi.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.