2020 is (finally) coming to a close. With all that’s happened this year, news from the book world might have slipped off your radar. Well, here’s one thing that has happened this year: Korean authors have been recognized for their talents by winning some of the most prestigious literary awards and prizes. In case you missed them or haven’t gotten to them yet, here are four books that you can check out, all by Korean authors and all recognized for excellence in 2020.

Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha

“Your House Will Pay” won the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. Cha’s novel follows two main characters and their families in present-day Los Angeles. Shawn Matthews is a Black man whose sister was killed by a Korean convenience store owner in 1991. Grace Park is a Korean American whose mother is injured in a drive-by shooting as she closes her pharmacy. In a city seething after the police shooting of an unarmed Black teenage boy, Shawn and Grace’s families collide amidst the chaotic buzz of the news and social media. As they struggle to deal with their trying predicaments, they unearth astonishing truths from their pasts that tie them together.

Considering the trajectory of American racial politics in 2020, “Your House Will Pay” is a timely fictionalization of recent LA history. The novel contends with the reverberating legacy of the murder of Latasha Harlins by Soon Ja Du in 1991 and the uprising that overtook LA in 1992 following the acquittal of the four police officers who brutally beat Rodney King. While exploring this fraught history, Cha manages to handle the sensitive material with nuance and care. Through her fictionalization of the events, Cha keeps the reader on the edge of their seat, developing suspense by withholding key information and revealing shocking secrets that come together at the end at a breathtaking pace.

The appeal of “Your House Will Pay” is largely twofold. While it delves into specific political and sociological issues like anti-Blackness, the US police and judicial systems, and Black-Korean relations in LA, it also weaves them into a thrilling narrative of family, revenge, justice, and the lasting impacts of violence and trauma.

DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi

“DMZ Colony” won the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry.
Don Mee Choi’s poetry collection explores the impacts of modern Korean history on memory and language. While the content is overtly political, the form is crafty and cerebral—take, for example, Choi’s poeticizing of the 38th parallel dividing North Korea from South Korea as she contemplates its arbitrary and abstract properties from St. Louis, Missouri. In addition to opening up this symbolic landmark to poetic considerations, Choi translates testimonies by Ahn Hak-Sop, a political prisoner who attests to being tortured; imagines the diary entries of orphans describing mass violence; and pairs photographs taken by her father and others with her own considerations of intergenerational trauma. Spanning great distances of space and time, Choi’s work teases out psychological mechanics that haunt and confound us.

Choi is a translator as well as a poet, and the concept of translation is central to Choi’s poetics, an anti(neo)colonial project meant to disturb stationary politics. The poet not only displays English and Korean translations side by side, but also mixes the two languages together. She even takes words apart letter by letter or reverses the orders of their letters, rendering both the Latin alphabet and Hangul strange again. Going even further than that, Choi presses the very notion of translation to its limits. Besides juxtaposing various discursive registers influenced by translation, testimony, diary entries, and oral history, Choi includes photographs, handwritten notes, and drawings. By showing the opaque and concrete materialities of languages and patterns, Choi accesses the liminal spaces between seemingly discrete ways of forming meaning.

“DMZ Colony” is a polished work from many vantage points, and its elegant boldness should impress and absorb readers who are willing to put in the work required to appreciate Choi’s multipronged approach to art.

The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories by Caroline Kim

“The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories,” a collection of short stories that explores facets of Korean identity across some impressive spectra of differences, won the 2020 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. The stories feature residents of Korea as well as characters who are a part of the Korean diaspora. Stories consider the lives of first-generation, 1.5-generation, and second-generation Korean Americans. Geographic settings vary from Korea to France to the US, and time periods vary from the 18th century to the 20th century to the future. Some characters speak in broken English, others in fluent English, while some stories take place in a Korean linguistic context.

While charting the multifaceted experiences and identities of Koreans across time and space, Kim’s collection is held together by intricate storytelling that explores the intimate emotional and social landscapes of its characters. Some of these characters include a Korean prince, families fleeing the Korean War, a father awaiting the birth of a grandchild, and a girl growing up in New England. Across this diverse cast, common themes emerge, such as survival, mental illness, language barriers, and the yearning to belong. The collection’s heterogeneity complicates and enriches the development of these themes, evincing that they can mean different things to different people in different contexts.

A memorable collection of intertwining fiction, “The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories” would be great for readers who would like to stretch their understanding of what it can mean to be Korean, and more generally, what it can mean to come from somewhere.

Hysteria by Kim Yideum (trans. Jake Levine, Soeun Seo, Hedgie Choi)

“Hysteria” won the 2020 National Translation Award and the 2020 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. Kim Yideum’s book is a collection of poems that aims fiery and sarcastic judgments at conservative, patriarchal society. In one poem, the poet expresses rage at bodily violations experienced on the subway when a man falls asleep on top of her. In another poem, the poet ponders the kisaeng (roughly, courtesan) that must have been erased from her genealogy as she contemplates the precursors to her own poetic craft and sexuality.

Kim’s poetry bristles against poetic conventions. At times it eschews line breaks for prose poetry and abrupt thoughts, and forsakes florid diction for curses and informal speech. Even so, Kim does not abandon poetic tradition and structure altogether, as she mixes lofty literary allusions and striking lyricism into her vernacular expressions and punchy syntactic constructions. As this unapologetically stunning combination, Kim’s poetry reclaims language and symbols denigrated and shamed by societal disapproval while challenging the oppressive linguistic and social structures that attempt to sweep marginalized experiences and rebellions under the rug.

Daring, candid, and captivating, “Hysteria” would appeal to readers interested in poetry that is unabashedly frank, politically subversive, and energized with an in-your-face attitude.