One of the reasons for Anton’s influential position is the combined speed and breadth of his work. His wide-ranging translations include not only Bora Chung’s uncanny short stories in Cursed Bunny and Djuna’s iconic science fiction Counterweight, but also the self-help books I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee and Kim Suhyun’s I Decided to Live as Me. These last two became bestsellers in Korea (with Sehee’s book also making it to the US bestseller list) thanks to the endorsement of Korean boy band BTS. It might not be a surprise then that Anton has also translated their biography, Beyond the Story: 10-Year History of BTS which reached number one in the New York Times bestseller list in 2023.
This year, Anton estimates that he has maybe ten books due for publication, with at least five already slated for 2026. In 2025, his list of authors includes Bora Chung, Le Young-do, Sung-il Kim, Kim Choyeop and Park Seolyeon. Anton’s second novel, as yet untitled, should also make it to print this year. Hur’s translations, which, he says in our interview, are experienced by readers as though they are “practically reading the Korean”, have been widely recognised by the literary establishment. They have been longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, twice for the National Book Critics Circle Award Barrios Prize, and twice in the same year for the International Booker Prize. In 2023, he was a finalist for the National Book Award, and this year his translation of Bora Chung’s Your Utopia is up for the Philip K. Dick Award. Anton is also serving as a judge for the 2025 International Booker Prize, a topic we touch on in our conversation.
Hur’s engagement with translation goes far beyond the act of transporting texts from one language to another. He actively supports emerging translators via his social media and blog, where among many other things, he offers innovative advice on how to successfully pitch translations to publishers, complete with a sample letter for grant applications (posts that established translators have flagged up to me as useful more than once). As we discuss in our interview, despite his protestations, Hur is also political, a translator activist—though I am not sure he would approve of this label. In his fiction, articles and interviews, he pushes back against the colonial attitudes he both sees and experiences in the publishing industry. During our conversation, he called out the “racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic” nature of the field. His solution? “Hire more translators of color and translators working from their heritage languages. Enough with the native speaker bullshit”.
In 2024, Anton published his first novel, Toward Eternity, which feels in some ways like an expression of its author’s worldview. In an increasingly plausible future dystopia, AI becomes all-powerful and turns on its human creators. The book’s genius, and one of its sources of literary beauty, is that this AI has been infiltrated by poetry. This poetry becomes a vehicle for resistance. Toward Eternity explores the nature of what it is to be human and, I would argue, the intrinsic importance of literature—a reflection of Hur’s academic background in Victorian poetry, his experience of translation, and his belief in the power of language.
Considering quite how busy Anton is, I was overjoyed that he had time to answer my questions via email whilst travelling earlier this year. He spoke about AI, personal bias in his work, writing as a form of translation, and the power of translating from your own language, as well as his role as judge for the International Booker. Anton also introduced me to my favourite new word—“copium”. I’ll let you enjoy the power of that one when you reach it.
—Sarah Gear, Assistant Interview Editor
Your novel Toward Eternity explores the role and power of language and poetry. At its core is an AI named Panit, which has been trained to read poetry. This same poetry is woven throughout the novel’s fabric, infusing its narrative arc. What does Toward Eternity tell us about the role of language, and poetry in particular? And should we interpret the novel as a warning, or indeed a celebration of artificial intelligence?
Oh god, I just realized from your question that a reading of Toward Eternity can definitely veer into a celebration of artificial intelligence, why did I not see that until now? Douglas Coupland in Microserfs talks about AI inevitably being human, as AI comes from humans and there’s nothing else it could possibly be in that case. Recent research into AI outcomes do suggest that artificial intelligence does take on the biases of its builders and the data it is provided. I was working from these rather old ideas that whatever AI we make, it will be in our image, and whatever we discover in them will be what already exists in us. And when I asked myself what we would discover in us when everything that we consider human—our bodies, our very species itself, the ecosystem that we can’t live separately from—is gone, what we will leave behind is our poetry and our language, because these are things that kind of have a life beyond us and are a part of the fabric of the universe in a way that our survival is not. But does that mean we should allow OpenAI or Anthropic to use our copyrighted data without permission? No, I think we need to torch those companies like Ellen Ripley did with the xenomorph eggs.
I’m sorry for suggesting the positive reading! I don’t agree with this reading, for the record, and think torching those eggs is a much better plan. But your answer made me wonder—if AI takes on the “biases of its builders” could this also apply to translation? How far are your own biases, your life experiences, woven into your translations?
I don’t even know where to begin, so much of myself goes into my translations, it’s the only way to imbue the characters and the narrator with any kind of human warmth or interiority. Everything—from what I choose to translate to how I calibrate the narrative distance to what tone and register I give to the characters or the narrator—is imbued with my own sense of being and the way I use language and put memories and readings together. I’m the filter that connects it all into a pleasing aesthetic. An AI is not going to have such an aesthetic. Every AI translation, when it’s not blatantly incorrect, is just goofy and dégoûtant.
In Toward Eternity, one of your characters describes language as, “its own creature. A creature that fed, grew, died, and was reborn again”. Does this imagery reflect your own view of language? If so, what role does literary translation play in this cycle?
Oh yes. Language to me is an interesting parasite that I have managed to create a kind of symbiosis with. It will exist long after everything that is Anton Hur has disappeared from the universe. There’s a scene in my book where a dying character recites every single poem she has ever known, over and over again until she dies, and she describes her belief that every time she reads or recites a poem, it changes that poem forever as it exists in the fundamental structure of our cosmos. That’s my belief, a belief I keep where other people keep Jesus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or whatever. Literary translation, to me, is an act of reading, much more so than an act of writing, and it is a way of mutating and perpetuating a language parasite into a new ecosystem, a new realm. I serve these parasites, as these gods bestow me with translation grants, award nominations, literary prestige, money to buy a house, nice dinners for my husband and all that. I am a religious zealot of the cult of the language parasite, and like most cult leaders, I am fleecing the acolytes for my personal gain. The fleecing just looks a lot like literary translation.
I adore your belief that through reading (and translating) we create something perpetually new. Is this something you have always understood, or a position that your translation work has brought you to? What works have had the most profound influence on you—and what have you come back to, and read differently as a translator?
I hardly think this is a special belief that I have, it’s what people seem to imply when they insist everyone has their own reading and judgment is relative and all that. I don’t think I’m a special reader as a translator. Sam Bett once said that translation is the slowest form of reading, that we slow down so much in our work that we see a lot of things other readers and sometimes even writers don’t see in the writing, so there’s that aspect, but really that’s just myself as the reader that I am, not myself as a different reader. The ending of AS Byatt’s Possession describes a type of re-reading where you discover something new in a text you’ve read several times before and what a thrill that can be, to understand a new thing in the face of an old thing. I can’t really describe that kind of reading better than that book. Everyone who cares about literature should read Possession.
It feels like the entire fabric of your novel embodies the process of translation. Versions (not copies) of your characters are repeated, replicated by the nanites that make up their bodies. They are in a very essential way translations of their original selves. In an interview with the Korean Herald, you described the process of writing Toward Eternity as though it were dictated to you by aliens—your hands a mere conduit for the words to reach the page. Could your writing be seen as yet another form of translation? To what extent does your work as a translator influence your literary process?
I’m so glad you caught that about the different clones being different readings or translations, that was exactly the way I intended them to be seen. I feel to a very large extent that every reader is a translator. They are translating someone else’s text into their own private language, even if they are technically reading in the same language the work was written. It’s not like Emily Dickinson used the same English as I did. I think the alien dictation part was from Jon Fosse, and my hands being a conduit for the words to find the page is an idea from Lee Seong-bok, who talks about this process in Indeterminate Inflorescence, a book so important to my creative process that I had to translate it in order to devour it, so to speak. My writing is definitely a form of translation. Writing is like a very easy form of translating. With writing, the language can go wherever it wants to go, but translation can’t meander too far from the source.
Do you feel that you can only fully “devour” a novel if you have translated it? And how far is it acceptable to wander from the source text in translation—do you feel more able to do this the more established you become?
I don’t privilege translation as a superior form of reading. There are so many great ways to read a book. I don’t have to translate Possession to feel every bone of its skeleton through the prose, if you know what I mean. And I never wander from the source text in translation. I understand when other translators do it and kudos to them, but I am more known for marrying sheer accuracy to breathtaking imagery. I am a very conservative translator. When you read my translations, you’re practically reading the Korean.
In one of your pieces published in Asymptote, “Fictional Notes Toward an Essay on Translation,” you write about the literal act of translation. You describe seeing the author, in this case Bora Chung, in place of your own reflection in the mirror. Is it difficult to separate yourself from your authors once the process of translation is complete? And I’m curious, will your own novel be translated, and would you translate it yourself? How would you feel about this process, given your own experience of translating others?
People keep asking me if I’m going to translate my own novel, and it’s one of those things that makes me feel really old because—when did self-translation suddenly become acceptable? In my day, back in the Stone Age, it was embarrassing to translate your own work because it meant no one was interested enough in your work to do it for you. Or that you were such a precious darling with your own words that you couldn’t possibly have another person besmirch your wonderfully perfect words. To this day, I find self-translation kind of repulsive. I can see how it can be interesting, but I just don’t find it interesting personally. Being translated is a great honor and a privilege, and I want that honor and privilege.
Your short fiction also explores topics that stray away from literature and translation. “Escape from America” feels very prescient now that Donald Trump is back in the White House and is dismantling so many rights for so many people. How far do your political and ethical concerns inform both your fiction and the texts you choose to translate?
In my mind I am a very bougie and reactionary person who tries to be as progressive as possible and frequently fails, and indeed this is how many of my tolerant friends no doubt see me, but in recent years I’ve been accused of being “activist” and—hilariously—“Leninist” in what I feel are very sensible positions such as wanting standardized contract terms that benefit all translators or not sending weaponry to regimes that use said weaponry to kill children, but apparently, the world has so gone to shite that even my bougie self is considered practically Communist. I grew up admiring writers who were engaged politically as a matter of course, and writing always seemed inextricable from politics, which is why I would select feminist or queer or anticolonial or what have you texts as a matter of course as well. Again, back in the Stone Age, this was not a particularly progressive attitude to have; it was a very middle-class, college-educated thing to have politics that centered the marginalized. That even such questions are being asked now speaks of how dark things are in this moment. A story I wrote satirizing 2021 should not be relevant in 2025!
Absolutely— I agree! The world does seem to be tilting on a dark, dangerous (and not entirely new) axis. I would love to know what texts you read growing up, and whether you think literature has the same power to spark politicised thinking now, when social media is all-invasive?
I’ve been thinking about The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing a lot lately; I think I read it because both Margaret Atwood and Barbara Kingsolver happened to mention it as an influence, and I remember when the New Progressive Party was breaking down in Korea, I kept remembering passages of it and marvelling at how similar the situations were. It’s quite an amazing book. I imagine books are irrelevant for people who don’t read books, but there are still people who do.
You have written and spoken a lot about translator rights, including the issue of racism in the publishing industry, and this fixed idea about who has the right to translate into which language. Has the situation improved since you began speaking out, and have campaigns such as #NameTheTranslator made a difference to the power translators have to change the industry? What still needs to change?
I still find publishing incredibly racist and sexist and homophobic and xenophobic, and the realm of translated literature is hardly immune. The Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 helped all people of color gain some momentum at the peak of the pandemic, but we have entered a reactionary phase where the pendulum has swung back in the other direction and lost some of those gains for now. It’s hard to tell whether #NameTheTranslator made gains or not for everyone, but I am totally behind its message and can anecdotally report that Jennifer Croft and Frank Wynne’s campaign in 2022 to put our names on the covers of our books has had noticeable effect. But I still see a dearth of translators of color and heritage-speaker translators who even get nominated for awards, much less win them, although Bruna Dantas Lobatos winning the 2023 National Book Award was a welcome event. I wrote about this more for The Washington Post where I crunched some numbers on the National Book Award and the International Booker Prize, and my conclusion was that we still have a long way to go.
What can publishers, funding bodies, and indeed readers, do about this now?
Hire more translators of color and translators working from their heritage languages. Enough with the native speaker bullshit. Fucking look at me! Does it look like it fucking matters that I’m not a native speaker? There’s got to be more translators like me out there. And there are.
I enjoyed your story about discovering Bora Chung at a bookstall run by a “niche speculative fiction publisher in Seoul,” rather than at one of the big international book fairs. What advantage does translating from your mother tongue, rather than into it, give you when discovering and translating Korean fiction?
It’s a very underrated position, especially in my language combination. There’s a famous old white translator who has publicly disparaged Korean nationals like me who translate into our second languages, and insofar as I think about him at all, it gives me great pleasure thinking of the copium he has to administer to himself because of my continuing presence in our field. His critique is from a deep-seated insecurity, of course. He will never have the level of comprehension and appreciation for Korean literature that I have. Not only that, having had everything handed to him as a white man means he doesn’t know how to pitch a book or even find a book on his own. Meanwhile, here I am discovering and translating Korean books on my own without relying on any institution or white privilege or dictionary.
How has your own network changed as you have become more established as a translator, and now author? How far does your success go to paving the way for other translators to work out of, rather than into, their first language?
I honestly have no idea. I’ve mentored and done submissions and pitches for many emerging translators, quite a few who have gone on to have publications and successful careers, but it always feels like a drop in a bucket. I’ve passed on a lot of work to emerging translators and made connections for them. Something I do as an instructor for British Centre for Literary Translation or Bread Loaf is offer lifelong mentoring to every student who passes through my workshops. They can come to me at any time with a sample or a proposal and we can work through the issues together. My success rate in my language combination is probably higher than the whole history of Literature Translation Institute of Korea’s so-called academy. But it’s going to take a movement, and a lot of people are working behind the scenes to make it happen.
You’ve had an incredible few years—from having two books shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022 to being on the judging panel in 2025. How does it feel to be judging this year? How do you think your translation background and activism will influence your decisions?
My translation background and “activism” will not influence my decisions at all because I will advocate for books based on pure literary merit instead of whether they were published by a fancy house the New Yorker likes to write about or were written by mediocre writers that other people keep trying to gaslight me into thinking are great. I have zero tolerance for white supremacy, systemic racism, the automatic discounting of interiorities and narratives from the Global South, genre discrimination, or whether you got your MFA from some corn-growing area of the United States. This is literary translation, it is global and decontextualized from the institutions that birthed it, institutions that I am not beholden to. The only thing that will influence my decision is whether a book is a great book in a great translation.
How does it feel to be invited to judge this prize, and is it more difficult, or easier than you expected?
I was surprised at how emotionally fraught the process turned out to be. The other judges were very patient with me and helped me through it, and if it weren’t for them and the Booker administrators, I don’t know if my mental health would’ve survived the process; and I did think seriously about stepping back at one point, for the good of the prize if anything. I’ve taken it so, so seriously. This prize really does change lives. It is an incredible honor to be a judge of a prize that has given me so much, and I didn’t even win!
You’ve cited the Booker Prize survey which found that translated fiction in the UK is primarily read by younger audiences—a stark contrast to the “Mythical English Reader” you describe in your essay for Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation. Are publishers beginning to recognize this shift? Do you think your translations, particularly those aimed at younger audiences (e.g., Beyond the Story: 10-Year Record of BTS, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, I Decided to Live as Me), are influencing what publishers choose to commission?
I am deep into my reading for the Booker, and I am wondering if indeed this is true, not the part about me being so influential but about publishers turning their sights to a younger audience. Or, to be fair to our wonderful older readers of translations, a more youthful audience, as one can be youthful at any age. My very personal impression is that it certainly does seem to be true that publishers of translated literature are more willing to embrace stories for and by younger people in the sense that certain genres are represented more in translation now than before. I know we’re all supposed to pretend that we all work from a great artistic fire in our hearts or whatever, but publishers and to some extent translators and even writers do pay attention to data, and it is certainly easier to publish certain things now than it was before. I would also like to point out that the three books of mine you mentioned are non-fiction, and one of the really great things in the past few years has been the increase in the publication of non-fiction in translation, that’s been such a rad shift. I want to read more Japanese self-help books and Italian food culture travelogues and Kenyan postcolonial theory—non-fiction in translation is such an underserved category.
Considering the prolific rate at which you translate and write, and the current popularity of Korean culture in the UK and US, I have to ask what you have planned next. Where do you see the translation of Korean literature into English heading in the next few years?
I feel like we peaked with Han Kang winning the Nobel Prize and it’s kinda going to be downhill from here, to be honest. Speaking of Han Kang, she has promised to publish three more books in the next six years, so that’s something for us all to look forward to. Many of our most internationally popular writers like Kyung-Sook Shin and Bora Chung are similarly at the top of their game and putting out books. I’m hoping for more Korean non-fiction and genre works to find an English-language readership, and believe me, I am working as hard as I can with seven books published last year and almost as many to come this year, so there will be lots and lots to indulge in by the end of 2026, at least ten for now and more to come.
