Deborah’s translations from the Korean include two novels by Han Kang, The Vegetarian (winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize) and Human Acts, and two by Bae Suah, A Greater Music and Recitation. In 2015 Deborah completed a PhD at SOAS on contemporary Korean literature and founded Tilted Axis Press. In 2016 she won the Arts Foundation Award for Literary Translation. She tweets as @londonkoreanist.
In 2012, two years after I’d started learning Korean with the dream of becoming a literary translator, I was asked to do a sample translation of Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian, by a publisher who’d received it from her agent Barbara Zitwer. At the time, I was too mortified to explain that, though I’d optimistically put ‘Literary Translator from Korean’ as my bio, I hadn’t yet attempted to even read an entire book, much less translate one. A year later, though, my skills had improved sufficiently for me to make the most of Korea’s being chosen as the market focus country for the London Book Fair, where I first met Max Porter, Kang’s wonderful editor at Portobello Books.
I met representatives from WCN [now the National Centre for Writing] at the London Book Fair and attended the
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