London Book Fair to feature Korea / Hwang Sun-mi

From the Korea Times, coverage of the upcoming London Book fair:

Contemporary Korean authors and literature will be on the international spotlight during the London Book Fair 2014 as Korea was chosen as the Market Focus. It shows the nation’s status as one of the top 10 publishing markets in the world and its growing presence in the international literary scene mainly due to author Shin Kyung-sook’s iconic novel “Please Look After Mom.”

Kind of amusing the credit given to Shin Kyung-sook here for an “iconic” novel. It was a pretty big success, but to stretch that to ‘iconic’ seems a bit much.^^

This fair will shift attention a bit, to Hwang Sun-mi:

The fair organizer has recently announced internationally acclaimed author Hwang Sun-mi renowned for “The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly” as the Market Focus Author of the Day. To honor Korea as the Market Focus, the Author of the Day program will feature the author for three days through various events such as book signing, photo calls and meetings with international publishers.

It is worth noting that the London Book Fair is primarily a B2B fair, which means not a lot of wandering around and looking at exhibits, or attending lectures. In fact, the lectures will be scheduled around the fair itself. Information on the fair can be found here, although I’m still trying to suss out where the related events will be and suspect that down the line the British Council and the Literature Translation Institute of Korea will be better places to hunt down events.