Book Café: Ch'oe Yun's "There a Petal Silently Falls" May 9, 2008

$10 for members (The Korea Society, Asia Society or Pen American Center members). $15 for non-members.

The Korea Society, Asia Society and the American PEN Translation Committee invite you to join us for a book launch reception and discussion on There a Petal Silently Falls and meet prize-winning Korean author Ch’oe Yun as she explores history, trauma, and the vagaries of remembrance in her collection of three stories. Elegantly crafted and quietly moving, Ch’oe's work portrays the psychological and spiritual reality of contemporary Korea against a backdrop of past state-sanctioned violence, hope for reconciliation, rampant consumerism and academic rivalries.

The author will discuss the stories with translators Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton.

About the Speakers

Ch'oe Yun, in addition to being an award-winning author, is professor of French literature at Sogang University in Seoul, Korea, and has translated contemporary Korean fiction into French. She received the 1992 Tongin Literature Prize for "The Gray Snowman" and the 1994 Yi Sang Literature Prize for "The Last of Hanak'o." Translations of her works can be found in Modern Korean Fiction: An Anthology (Columbia University Press, 2005) and Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction. Her writings have also been translated into French and Spanish.

Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton are the translators of the Korean women's anthologies Words of Farewell and Wayfarer and co-translators with Marshall R. Pihl of Land of Exile. They have also translated contemporary Korean novels such as Hwang Sun-won's Trees on a Slope and Cho Se-hui's The Dwarf. Bruce Fulton is the inaugural holder of the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation at the University of British Columbia, co-translator of A Ready-Made Life, coeditor of Modern Korean Fiction, feature editor of Seeing the Invisible, and associate editor for Korea of The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature.

Official Website: http://www.koreasociety.org/contemporary_issues/contemporary_issues/book_cafe_choe_yuns_there_a_petal_silently_falls_.html