Imiri Nae, the first Korean to receive the William Saroyan Literary Award

by times news cr

Award for the novel ‘Nameless…’

Rookie author Lee Mi-ri-nae (41, pictured), who wrote the novel ‘Eight Lives of a Nameless Woman’, has become the first Korean author to win the William Saroyan International Literature Award in the United States.

According to the William Saroyan Foundation and others on the 25th, this writer was selected as the winner of this year’s William Saroyan International Literary Award in the novel category. The winning work is the author’s debut novel that contains the story of a woman who lived through turbulent times such as the Japanese colonial period, liberation, the Korean War, and division. The judges said, “It is a beautiful and complex story about the strong and weak human nature,” and “The desire to uncover the mystery of the attractive characters creates suspense, while the lyrical sentences make you want to slowly savor the work.”

Established in 2003 to honor American novelist and playwright William Saroyan (1908–1981), this award is jointly hosted by the Saroyan Foundation and Stanford University Library and is given every two years to select the most notable work of new writers in the fiction and nonfiction categories. Past winners in the fiction category include Nicole Krauss’s “A History of Love” and last year’s Pulitzer Prize winner Hernán Díaz’s “From afar.”

The author, whose native language is Korean, wrote this work in English and first published it in the UK and the US. The Korean version was published last month. The author said, “I am surprised and happy to have won one of the few literary awards in the US that is open to foreigners.”


Reporter Kim So-min [email protected]

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2024-08-26 05:43:34

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