Reading List
Anton Hur
Translator and Novelist
Anton Hur is a translator and novelist who works between Korean and English. His translations include Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny and Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City, both of which reached the International Booker Prize lists in 2022, making him the first translator shortlisted twice in the same year. He has also translated Shin Kyung-sook’s Violets and The Court Dancer, Kyung-Sook Shin’s work more broadly, and poetry by Kim Bo-young and Baek Sehee, whose I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki reached a wide English readership.
His debut novel, Toward Eternity, was published in 2024. He has written on translation for a range of publications and served as a judge for the 2025 International Booker Prize, the year that produced the shortlist he discusses here.
A Leopard-Skin Hat
by Anne Serre
“I think this book in particular, while surely a fine work of literature in the original French, really takes on something extra in translation. It is a work of great empathy and, therefore, love, a careful attempt by a narrator who is trying to understand a friend who is inaccessible to him, as we are all ultimately inaccessible to each other. But he tries anyway.” — Source
Heart Lamp: Selected Stories
by Banu Mushtaq
“Oh, many things. But I have got to say that for me it was the translation—so daring and textured and vitalic. The stories also, for a book that has the word “heart” in the title, kept breaking mine. The way these women keep colliding with both tradition and modernity is so acutely observed. Anyone—of any gender or age or country—can’t help but relate to their struggles between past and present. We’re all doing that.” — Source
Under the Eye of the Big Bird
by Hiromi Kawakami
“There is just so much anxiety in our post-pandemic world. We had to get used to thinking of ourselves as not just communities or nations but as an entire species. But will we ever manage to do so, really? This novel is about the end of humanity as we know it. But it is full of hope, at the same time.” — Source
Small Boat
by Vincent Delecroix
“This is a novel that is written from the perspective of a rescue boat dispatcher who fails to dispatch a rescue team for a group of migrants who subsequently sink to their deaths. This book will hopefully disturb you and make you question why you feel so disturbed. It is a short book that is nevertheless full of horror and rage and guilt.” — Source
On the Calculation of Volume
by Solvej Balle
“I think what we ultimately love about this book is how different it feels from the way we tend to live life now, going about our day with our senses deadened and our fingers scrolling through social media feeds, completely in denial of time as it passes. The whole book is a real antidote to the toxic warping of our sense of time and space.” — Source