Yun Ko-Eun

Yun Ko-Eun is a South Korean novelist whose slim, carefully crafted books probe the darker ethical dimensions of contemporary life with a deceptive lightness. Her novel The Disaster Tourist (2013) — translated into English by Lizzie Buehler — is a precise, unsettling satire about a woman who works for a company that organises "disaster tourism" holidays to sites of catastrophe, and who is sent to evaluate a destination whose tragedy has become insufficiently terrible to attract visitors.

The novel uses its premise to ask uncomfortable questions about the commodification of suffering, the aestheticisation of poverty and disaster, and the complicity of those who observe but do not act. Yun writes without moral hectoring; she trusts the premise to do its work.