The Jury Chair's Connection with Han River's 'Chaesikjuuija'... Writer Max Porter
Anton Hur (Korean name Heo Jeong-beom), a translator and novelist well known as the English translator of the novel The Curse Rabbit, will serve as a judge for the prestigious UK literary award, the International Booker Prize.
According to the International Booker Prize website on the 10th (local time), five judges have been appointed for next year’s awards ceremony: Max Porter, Caleb Femi, Sana Goyal, Anton Hur, and Beth Orton. Among the five, Porter will serve as the chair of the judging panel.
The International Booker Prize, the international category of the UK’s most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize, is jointly awarded to authors and translators of non-English literary works translated into English. Korean works have been shortlisted five times at this awards ceremony, most recently with Hwang Sok-yong’s Three Generations of Railroad Workers this year.
This is the first time a Korean has been appointed as a judge since the Booker Prize introduced the International category and began awarding it in 2005.
Anton Hur, who will serve as a judge next year, translated novelist Jeong Bora’s The Curse Rabbit, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker International Prize, and was a longlist nominee the same year as the translator of Park Sang-young’s Love in the Big City.
Anton Hur has translated into English works such as Hwang Sok-yong’s Prisoner, Kang Kyung-ae’s Underground Village, Baek Se-hee’s I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, and BTS’s memoir Beyond the Story, and translated Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous into Korean.
Anton Hur’s own English novel, Toward Eternity, was published in the United States on the 9th. He is currently conducting a book tour in several US cities.
In Korea, he published an essay collection titled You Didn’t Say Not to Do It? last year.
Having spent much of his youth abroad due to his father’s overseas assignments, he was born in Sweden and spent his adolescence in places such as Hong Kong and Thailand. He later studied law and psychology at Korea University and English literature at Seoul National University Graduate School.
Max Porter, who will chair next year’s International Booker Prize judging panel, is a British novelist who wrote Grief is the Thing with Feathers, which has also been translated and published in Korea. While working as an editor at the publishing house Granta Portobello Books, he contributed to the English translation publication of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. This book won the Man Booker International Prize, the predecessor of the International Booker Prize, in 2016.
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