Poet Kim Hyesoon Selected as 'T.S. Eliot Reader' by Harvard University Library in the U.S.

Poet Kim Hye-soon was selected as this year's 'T. S. Eliot Memorial Reader' by the Harvard University Library, Literary and Intelligence Publishing announced on the 25th.

The 'T.S. Eliot Memorial Reader' is a cultural event jointly hosted by the Woodberry Poetry Room, a poetry recitation archive within Harvard's Lamont Library, and the T.S. Eliot Foundation. It was established in the name of T.S. Eliot (1888?1965), a representative modernist poet and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate in 1948 who graduated from Harvard University. Each year, one poet with outstanding work is selected to be given opportunities for recitation and speeches. Poet Kim's recitation event is scheduled to be held locally on October 2.

Poet Kim Hye-sun. [Photo by Korea Literature Translation Institute]

At the poetry recitation event scheduled for October 2, Poet Kim will share the stage with American poet and translator Choi Don-mi, who translated Kim's poetry collections Autobiography of Death and Wing Fantasia into English.

In 2019, Kim became the first Korean to win the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, the most prestigious translation award in the English-speaking world, for the English translation of Autobiography of Death. In May of this year, the English edition of her thirteenth poetry collection, Wing Fantasia, published in 2019, was released and received favorable reviews locally. The local literary magazine The New Yorker praised Kim in its April 14 issue, stating that she "has built an approach to language and writing for poets and artists both in Korea and those experiencing diaspora."

Kim's poetry is gaining global attention. Last month, she attended the Berlin Poetry Festival in Germany as the 'Speaker of the Year,' introducing the literary world under the title "Mother Tongue Without a Tongue."

Prior to the Harvard University Library recitation in October, she plans to participate in a series of lectures and reading gatherings in New York, Boston, and other locations starting in September.

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