Meet the author : Sang Young Park
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The success of Love in the Big City can certainly be called surprising. The subject – the wild city life of a queer millennial – is not an obvious literary theme in Korea. And yet both the book and the writer were widely praised. His sensitive, humorous style certainly has something to do with that.
‘The prose reads like an iPhone screen, vibrant and addictive. What a joy it is to see such a profound exploration of contemporary queer life.’ – The New York Times
Writer and screenwriter Angelo Tijssens will talk to Park about the exciting debut and about the follow-up, Make Me One Dimensional. This new novel will be presented exclusively at the festival.
Make Me One Dimensional is Sang Young Park’s first traditional novel. One day, a star psychologist receives an anonymous message about a body found at the bottom of a lake in Daegu, the conservative city where he grew up. He immediately knows whose body it is and in a way seems to be to blame for the fact that the corpse is there.
The news makes the main character (who remains nameless throughout the novel) think back to his troubled teenage years for the first time in a long time. The energy-laden summer of 2002, when South Korea and Japan hosted the World Cup. The years he spent studying for his entrance exams under immense pressure, as his destitute family hoped he could go to a leading university. The evening classes where he struggled to make friends and where he fell in love with another man for the first time.
This book gave many Korean readers nightmares about their own secondary-school days and the internalized self-hatred and homophobia they experienced at the time.
about the author
Sang Young Park (b. 1988) is one of South Korea’s most high-profile young writers. He grew up in the conservative city of Daegu, before moving to Seoul in his twenties and studying French and journalism. In 2016 he won the New Writers Award for his first story and subsequently published a successful collection of short stories. His debut novel, Love in the Big City, became an unstoppable bestseller and was nominated for the Booker International Prize.
about the moderator
Angelo Tijssens (b. 1986) studied theatre in Antwerp. He has written several short films and is a joint screenwriter of Girl and Close, two multi-award-winning films by Lukas Dhont. He has also been part of the artistic core of the internationally renowned company Ontroerend Goed for over a decade. His debut novel, De randen, was published in 2022.
Brandon Taylor
ORG. Passa Porta, Korean Cultural Center, Das Mag
picture © Bong-Gon Kim
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