We are pleased to announce that Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire, co-edited by Theodore Hughes, the Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Humanities and the Director of the Center for Korean Research at Columbia University, was named a Finalist for the Daesan Literary Translation Prize.
The Daesan Literary Translation Prize, South Korea’s most prestigious translation award, is selected from works translated over a four-year period. This year, five finalists were selected from 72 entries.
Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire, published by the Cornell East Asia Series in 2013, brings together thirteen short stories by colonial Korean writers, as well as two works written in 1946 under U.S. military occupation. Political cartoons, illustrations, newspaper clippings, and photographs–over sixty included in the volume–place the works of Korean writers in close conversation with the rich history of colonial proletarian visual culture. This anthology moves across verbal and visual media and geographical borders, following characters making their way through disintegrating rural areas and flourishing colonial urban centers, from the alluring margins of the Japanese metropole to the expanding Manchurian frontier.
Professor Hughes co-edited Rat Fire with Sang-kyung Lee, Jae-Yong Kim, and Jin-Kyung Lee.
