SEOUL, July 18 (AJP) - South Korean poet Kim Hye-soon has been awarded the International Prize for Literature by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Germany for the German translation of her poetry collection "Autobiography of Death" on Thursday.
HKW announced Kim as the winner from a shortlist of six authors, including Turkey’s Dogan Akhanli, Canada’s Sarah Bernstein, Ukraine’s Anna Melikova, France’s Neige Sinno, and the U.S.'s Jesmyn Ward.
The jury unanimously selected Kim, saying that her poetry reveals meaning “precisely in the enigmatic,” adding, “The texts open up as we follow their rhythm and read them over and over again, the images reveal themselves like directions that only become visible when the right direction has already been taken.”
Jury member and German writer Deniz Utlu praised the collection as “translations from death’s native language,” describing it as “miraculously opening up the possibility of listening to this language as it sounds on the threshold of the afterlife.”
Kim did not attend the ceremony in person but delivered her remarks via video call, expressing gratitude to translators Park Sul and Uljana Wolf, the jury, HKW, her publisher S. Fischer, and all those involved in organizing the event. The award, established in 2009, honors outstanding contemporary works translated into German and is jointly presented to both the author and the translators.
"Autobiography of Death" was originally published in Korean in 2016 and translated into German earlier this year. The poems, inspired by Kim’s collapse in a subway station in 2015, reflect on national tragedies such as the MERS outbreak and the Sewol ferry disaster. The collection comprises 49 poems exploring the boundary between life and death.
Kim is the first Asian and the first poet to receive the HKW prize. South Korean Nobel laureate Han Kang was also a finalist for the award in 2017 with the German translation of her novel "The Vegetarian."
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