“I read The Vegetarian and fell in love with it. A year later, I was invited to go and speak at the London Book Fair (which I'd never even heard of before), as they were gearing up for Korea being the market focus country in 2014. I met Max Porter there, Kang's editor at Portobello, sent him my sample, and the rest is history.” YearsBookCountrySpeakFocusHeardMetsFairsLondonEditorsVegetarianInvitedKoreaMaxSampleGearing Up Author:Deborah Smith
“Whenever I visit Korea she [Kang] buys me lunch and takes me to a gallery. As if all this wasn't enough, she has incredible respect for translation as a creative, artistic practice - she insists that each English version is 'our book', offered to share her fees with me when she found out I wasn't getting paid for translating her publicity stuff, always asks the editor to credit me, and does so herself whenever she's interviewed. Too good to be true.” IfsDoeBookEnoughAsksFoundStuffPracticeCreativeSharePaidIncrediblesCreditVersionsBeing TrueArtisticEditorsTake MeLunchTranslateTranslationsKoreaPublicityGalleryFeesCreative ArtToo Good To Be True Author:Deborah Smith
“I was in the second year of my PhD when I first had the idea - I'd recently started working as a translator, which meant firstly that I was hearing about amazing-sounding books from other translators, and also that I was getting enough of an insider's view of the publishing industry to be aware of all the implicit biases that made it so difficult for these books to ever get published, especially if they weren't from European languages (harder to discover, editors can't read the original, lack of funding programmes, authors who don't speak English).” IfsYearsFirstsMadeBookIdeasEnoughSpeakLanguageDifficultViewsIndustryHarderOriginalsHearingMade ItEditorsPublishingFundingProgrammesImplicitTranslatorsSpeak EnglishInsidersPhdsPublishing Industry Author:Deborah Smith
