Autorentext

Born in 1989, Park Seolyeon made her debut by winning the Silcheon Munhak New Writers Prize in 2015. She is the author of A Magical Girl Retires among other novels and short story collections. In 2018, she won the Hankyoreh Literature Prize for her novel Capitalists Must Starve. Her stories have been translated into Japanese, French, German, and English. She currently lives in Seoul.

Anton Hur was born in Stockholm. He is the author of Toward Eternity and has been nominated for the International Booker Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Dublin Literary Award for his various translations including Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park and A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon. He lives in Seoul.

Klappentext

Winner of 2018 Hankyoreh Literature Award, this work is based directly on the life of Kang Juryong, a female worker who led a strike at the Pyongwon rubber factory in Pyongyang in 1931, climbing the roof of Eulmildae to protest working conditions. In a Japan-occupied Korea, Kang Juryong leads a peripatetic life with her impoverished parents, moving around from Ganggye to Gando and Seoriwon. She hopes to study and become a 'modern girl', but reality prevents her from realizing those dreams. At her parents' suggestion, she gets married, but when her husband suddenly dies, her parents plan for her to marry again, this time to the owner of their house. Instead, Juryong leaves them, heading for Pyongyang. There, while working at a rubber factory, she joins the red trade union and accuses the factory owners of exploiting the workers. Reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace and Min Jin Lee's Pachinko, this historical fiction tells an ultimate story of ascent by leading to the female working-class hero who loved and fought through the brutal age of the early 20th Century.