Bora Chung

Bora Chung is a Korean author and translator whose fiction has electrified international readers with its fusion of body horror, dark absurdism, and incisive social critique. Her debut collection in English, Cursed Bunny (2022) — translated by Anton Hur and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize — announced her as one of the most fearless writers working in Korean today.

Her stories traffic in flesh and contamination, in the monstrous offspring of late capitalism, in the ways institutions and systems colonise the body. A fox-demon takes a corporate job. A factory produces something no one can quite name. The horror in Chung's work is never decorative; it grows directly from the world we already live in. She holds a doctorate in Russian literature and teaches at Yonsei University, and her translation work — she has brought Dostoevsky and others into Korean — informs the rigorous intelligence of her own prose.