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I read The Vegetarian and fell in love with it. A year later, I was invited to go and speak at the London Book Fair (which I'd never even heard of before), as they were gearing up for Korea being the market focus country in 2014. I met Max Porter there, Kang's editor at Portobello, sent him my sample, and the rest is history.

Deborah Smith

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Deborah Smith
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: September 27
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More quotes by Deborah Smith

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There's no linear narrative - the structure is more like a series of variations on a theme (how identity is shaped by language), with the past constantly bleeding into the present, dreams into reality. And the language, while incredibly lyrical in places, also has this underlying dissonance, the sense of it having itself been translated.
Deborah Smith
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All of which suggested literary translation, and Korean seemed a good bet - barely anything available in English, yet it was a modern, developed country, so the work had to be out there, plus the rarity would make it both easier to secure a student grant and more of a niche when it came to work.
Deborah Smith
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I first came across her [Bae Suah] when I read some elderly male critic castigating her for 'doing violence to the Korean language', which of course was catnip to me, especially as I'd recently discovered Lispector doing pretty much the same to Portuguese.
Deborah Smith
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I taught myself the first year course while I was on the dole, then moved to London to do an MA at SOAS, which led straight into a PhD.
Deborah Smith
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The hardest memories are the pieces of what might have been.
Deborah Smith
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Alongside Han Kang, there's only one other author I've chosen to translate so far - Bae Suah. Her work is radical both stylistically and politically, influenced by her own translation practice (she's translated the likes of Kafka, Pessoa, and Sadeq Hedayat into Korean). Her language is simply extraordinary.
Deborah Smith
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And to improve access to the UK publishing industry - I'm hoping to set up an internship or work experience for someone from a low-income background, as soon as we have the funds. While we don't have the funds, we won't have an intern.
Deborah Smith
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A photograph is a souvenir of life!
Deborah Smith
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Simon Collinson, of digital publisher Canelo and über-cool Aussie mag The Lifted Brow, is our digital producer Sarah Shin, Verso's comms director, is helping us out with press publicity Soraya Gilanni, who mainly does production and set design for films and commercials, is our art director.
Deborah Smith
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Our first-year list is Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay (translated by Arunava Sinha), Hwang Jung-eun (translated by Jung Yewon), and Khairani Barokka.
Deborah Smith
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Not only are unpaid internships exploitative, they're one of the main forces keeping publishing in this country a primary white middle-class industry, which has a direct knock-on effect on what gets published and how.
Deborah Smith
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I teach Korean translation at the British Centre for Literary Translation summer school, so I see an emerging generation too, who are around my age. I'm hoping to find time to mentor, and to help emerging translators to a first contract through Tilted Axis.
Deborah Smith
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What do you call love, then? Someone I can't live without.
Deborah Smith
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I've translated two of Bae's novels, A Greater Music and Recitation, which are coming from Open Letter and Deep Vellum in October and January respectively. A Greater Music is a semi-autobiographical book centred on a Korean writer moving to Berlin, learning to live and even write in a foreign language.
Deborah Smith
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We are all bodies of water, guarding the mystery of our depths, but some of us have more to guard than others.
Deborah Smith