Podcast, Original Fiction
The Flowering
Our fourth podcast for April is “The Flowering” written by Soyeon Jeong and read by Kate Baker.
Originally published in Korean in the collection Dokjaeja. (Seoul: Bbul, 2010.)
Published with the support of Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea).
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:39 — 51.7MB)
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Soyeon Jeong is a science fiction writer, translator, and human-rights lawyer living in Seoul, South Korea. Her fiction has appeared in numerous South Korean SF anthologies since 2004. Her short story "Cosmic Go"—recently published in English translation in the collection Readymade Bodhisattva (Los Angeles: Kaya Press, 2019)—won the 2005 Science and Technology Creative Award, and her short story collection Yeonghui Next Door (Yeopjip ui Yeonghui ssi) won the Book for the Year for Young Adults in South Korea Award in 2015.
She is also a prolific translator of English-language science fiction to Korean, primarily having produced Korean translations of modern American SF novels such as Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark (selected by Fantastique Magazine as the best work of SF published in Korean in 2007), David Gerrold's The Martian Child, Nancy Kress's Beggars in Spain, and Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, and through her translation she has helped to shape the content and scope of the South Korean SF canon. One of the founding members of a major Korean SF fansite and publisher Geoul (Mirror), she is the founder and chairperson of the Science Fiction Writer's Union of the Republic of Korea, and the executive director of the Boda Initiative, a non-profit organization whose mission is the education of children in developing countries.
Gord Sellar was born in Malawi, raised in Canada, and has lived in South Korea since 2002, where he has taught at universities, played saxophone in an indie-rock band, and worked as a writer, editor, and co-translator. He attended Clarion West in 2006, was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2009, and his fiction has appeared in Asimov's SF, Analog, Interzone, Clarkesworld, and several best of the year anthologies.
Jihyun Park is a translator and filmmaker whose debut outing, the award-winning "The Music of Jo Hyeja" (2012) was the first Korean-language film adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story. You can learn more about it, and her other film work, at brutalrice.com.