Wasafiri Wonders: Anton Hur

For this instalment of our Wasafiri  Wonders series – discussing craft, inspirations, influences, and more, with writers of all kinds – we spoke to 2025 International Booker Prize judge and our Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize judge for Fiction this year, Anton Hur, on his writing habits and rituals, the art of translation, and upcoming work.

Anton will be running a Pitching Your Translation workshop and delivering a lecture on Prizing Korean Literature on 28-29 October, 2025 at Queen Mary University London. More details here.

What are your writing and/or translating rituals? 

The important thing is to get out of my own way and not be so conscious of what I am writing or translating. There are ways to distract your conscious mind, like taking your laptop to a café for the ambient noise; there are YouTube videos that also play eight hours of ambient noise like sounds of rain or whatever. The BBC Sounds app has a free program called Ambient Focus and I’ve found it useful for this as well. Any music without lyrics, really. Classical music. Some writers turn to alcoholism to turn off their conscious minds and let the words flow from the subconscious, but I don’t think that’s a good idea. 

What themes do you gravitate towards and why? 

I think a lot about writing, writers, poetry, literature, and art in general. I also shade into politics like neocolonialism (because Korea is an American neocolony) and genocide denial (because we used to be a Japanese colony). I’m very intent on the power and limitations of language and storytelling in the face of the real world with its real terrors. It’s almost easier to think of themes I’m not interested in: family, identity, romantic relationships, what goes on in summer houses. I think it’s important to know what you’re not interested in so you can incorporate that into your work and challenge yourself to make it interesting. 

What was the most difficult thing you’ve ever had to translate? 

There’s a recently released high fantasy book titled Blood of the Old Kings by Sung-Il Kim. I love how it’s written; very sparse yet ultra-cinematic and designed as meticulously and thrillingly as a rollercoaster ride. I had never translated high fantasy before, and I wanted to do the genre and the book justice out of respect for the real readers and fans of the genre. I had to figure things out like, ‘What would a dragon sound like if it talked? What register would it use?’ and that sort of thing. It was very difficult at first, as I didn’t know how to make things work. But I’m very proud of the result. 

What’s a book you’ve read in multiple languages and loved? 

I guess The Plague by Albert Camus. Not only have I read this in multiple languages, I’ve read different translations into the same languages, most recently the one Laura Marris did for Knopf. Camus is not without his problematic moments, but The Plague was such an important book for me in my teenage years. I wouldn’t quite say it ‘shaped’ who I am, it was more like recognising in it the shape of who I was — a very fundamental part of me. There are others that I read in multiple languages: Beloved by Toni Morrison, Possession by AS Byatt. 

How would you define/describe ‘translation’? 

I’m trying to think of a non-banal answer to this question — I guess it’s a series of choices as to what you decide to carry over and what you decide to leave behind. Sometimes, it is a matter of deciding that the shape of something’s absence is more interesting and generative than the thing itself. You have to be a very sensitive person to make that distinction in the moment of translation. A machine – certainly no machine that exists now or will exist for the next century – will never have this sensitivity. Translation is that which a machine can never achieve, which is a series of choices made with aesthetic intent. 

You translate a lot of genre fiction, especially work with speculative elements. What are your favourite recurring narrative or thematic elements in Korean genre fiction? 

I don’t really care about the narrative or thematic elements of a book I am translating. I only care about its language. I like a work that pushes language to give more than what we would normally expect it to give. Can words heal us, astound us, make us cry, make us feel, change who we are — and how do we make words do that? In translation no less. And because my preoccupation is with language and not genre, I tend to have worked across arbitrary boundaries and not just the literary/genre divide. I’ve done non-fiction, poetry, memoir, anything where the language does or seeks something interesting. 

How does your translation work and your book writing feed into each other, if at all? 

Both are an exercise in learning to let go, so they’re very similar in that way. Writing is much easier, but still pretty similar to translation. Because I am so used to pitching translations to publishers, I was totally uninterested in the pitching process for my novel and was very hands-off and unanxious when it came to my agents selling my book, and I was right to be so because they ended up doing a fantastic job. I did not want my experience as a translator to interfere with the business side of my writing. That said, I loved doing structural edits! 

If your book Toward Eternity were a music album, what would it be and why? 

Gosh, I have no clue. Fumbling Towards Ecstasy by Sarah McLachlan? I did want that kind of very intimate yet epic soundscape to the book. 

What is the best translation advice you’ve ever received that you’d give to emerging writers and translators? 

Translation is all about making it work in the target language, and you’ve got to be constantly trying different things and tinkering with the work to figure out if you have the right voice, the right approach, the right amount of distance between narrator and narrative. Sometimes, the most obvious option will be the best one, but in others, you have a lot of thinking and experimenting and soul-searching ahead of you before a work turns into something magical in translation. Don’t treat yourself like a translation factory, you are a couturier of words. Make it bespoke. 

What can we look forward to from you next? 

I have quite a few things in translation coming out but I think I want to concentrate more on my writing in the next year. I’m writing a novel about painters in Korean, which I have no idea if it’ll be translated into English, and no, I have no inclination to do it myself. I have two separate commissions for short stories in Korean, so I guess this is turning into a 'writing in Korean' year for me. Bora Chung told me she would rather I do more writing than translating so she has more things to translate. Bold of her to assume that I would hire her as a translator again! Just kidding, I am very honoured to be translated by my author, but I and her many fans want her to be writing as well.  

Anton Hur will be delivering a writing workshop and public lecture later this month (October 2025) at Queen Mary University London. Both are open to the public. More information is available here. 

Cover image: Illustrated by Simone Khanyi Hadebe