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Kim Hye-jin
🇰🇷South Korea
Kim Hye-jin is a South Korean author whose slim, precise novels engage directly with questions of labour, gender, and social belonging. Her novel Concerning My Daughter (2017), translated into English by Jamie Chang, approaches its subject — a mother coming to terms with her daughter's lesbianism and the daughter's relationship with a partner — through the perspective of the disapproving mother herself, in a gesture of formal intelligence that allows the novel to hold both characters' humanity simultaneously.
The novel was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and established Kim as an important voice in contemporary Korean fiction, one whose method is quiet but whose impact is not.
