Kim Hyesoon's Poetry Collection 'A Glass of Red Mirror', Nominated for the Best Translation Award at the US Three Percent

Photo by Yonhap News Agency

[Asia Economy Reporter Park Byung-hee] Poet Kim Hye-soon's poetry collection A Drink of Red Mirror has been nominated for the Best Translated Book Award presented by Three Percent. Three Percent is a translation literature specialized website operated by the University of Rochester in the United States.

A Drink of Red Mirror was published in the U.S. last year under the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. The English translation was done by Professor Shin Ji-won of Korean Literature at Arizona State University and her students Lauren Alvin and Bae Soo-hyun.

The Literature Translation Institute of Korea established a "Korean Literature Translation Workshop" course at Arizona State University in 2015. Since then, Professor Shin has conducted a translation course for A Drink of Red Mirror for one semester. Among the 10 students, Alvin and Bae, who showed outstanding translation skills, were selected as co-translators.

Three Percent established the Best Translated Book Award in 2007. Since 2011, with sponsorship from Amazon Publishing, it has annually selected one best novel and one best poetry collection. The award targets translated works published in the U.S. the previous year. This year, 35 works (25 novels and 10 poetry collections) by authors from 20 countries, including 2018 Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk (Poland), Yoko Ogawa, and Hiromi Kawakami (Japan), were announced as nominees.

Poet Kim Hye-soon previously received the Griffin Poetry Prize in Canada last year for her poetry collection Autobiography of Death, becoming the first Asian writer to win the award.

The winner of Three Percent's Best Translated Book Award will be announced on the 27th of next month. Both the winning author and translator will receive a prize of $5,000 (approximately 6 million KRW) each.

The Literature Translation Institute of Korea also reported that Kim Young-ha's novel The Plotters ranked first on Germany's "April Best Mystery Novel List," and Son Won-pyung's novel Almond was selected as the winner in the translated novel category of Japan's "2020 Booksellers Award."

Germany's Best Mystery Novel List is jointly announced by the daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and the current affairs radio channel Deutschlandfunk Kultur. This is the second time a Korean work has been included on this list since Jeong You-jeong's Seven Years of Night ranked eighth in 2015.

Japan's Booksellers Award, established in 2004, determines winners in four categories?Booksellers Award (Japanese novels), Discovery category (all genres), Translated Novel category, and Non-fiction category?based on recommendations and votes from bookstore staff for works published in the previous year. This is the first time a Korean work has been nominated and won in the Translated Novel category. Almond was selected as a translation support project by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea in 2018, and its Japanese edition was published last year by Shodensha, a mid-sized Japanese publisher.