Upcoming Meetings
Next meeting: Monday 18 August 2025, 6.30pm
At the next Litfest International Fiction Online Book Club meeting we will discuss Bae Suah’s Untold Night and Day (translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith) and published in paperback and eBook by Vintage)
‘As cryptic and compelling as a fever dream… Bae Suah is one of the most unique and adroit literary voices working today’ Sharlene Teo
Finishing her last shift at Seoul’s only audio theatre for the blind, Kim Ayami heads into the night with her former boss, searching for a missing friend. The following day, she looks after a visiting poet, a man who is not as he seems. Unfolding over a night and a day in the sweltering summer heat, their world’s order gives way to chaos, the edges of reality start to fray, and the past intrudes on the present in increasingly disorientating ways.
Untold Night and Day is a hallucinatory feat of storytelling from one of the most radical voices in contemporary Korean literature.
‘Highly original… Once I finished it, much of it slipped into my subconscious’ Daily Telegraph
Author
Bae Suah was born in Seoul in 1965. She studied chemistry at university and wrote her first short story as a way of practising her typing. Since 1993 she has published more than a dozen novels and short story collections. Untold Night and Day is her first book to be published in the UK.
Photo of Bae Suah by Ali Ghandtschi
Translator
Deborah Smith is a British translator of Korean literature, mainly fiction by Bae Suah and Han Kang. In 2015 she founded Tilted Axis Press, a not-for-profit company publishing contemporary Asian writing to shake up the canon of contemporary world literature in English, with translations from Bengali, Thai, Uzbek, Korean, Japanese, Turkish, and more. In 2016, her translation of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian won the Man Booker International Prize. Deborah’s work on translation includes public speaking, consultancy, reviews and feature writing, prize judging, teaching, mentoring and guest editing. Her book-length essay on translation, Fidelity, was published by Peninsula Press in 2019; her most recent translation (with Emily Yae Won) is Greek Lessons by Han Kang (2023).
Photo of Deborah Smith at the 2016 Booker International Awards Ceremony by Janie Airey
Join The Club
To join the Litfest International Fiction Book Club which meets regularly, usually on the third Monday of every month, email Bill Swainson at [email protected]
You can buy a paperback copy of this month’s book and other book club choices by going to our online bookshop and in this way – or by donating – support the book club and Litfest’s work. Thank you.
