In Penal Colony ×

Jung Young Moon (b. 1965) is a South Korean novelist and short story writer. He studied psychology at Seoul National University and made his literary debut with the publication of 겨우 존재하는 인간 (A Man Who Barely Exists) in the Winter 1996 issue of the quarterly magazine 작가세계 (Writer’s World ). Since then, he has published fifteen novels and short story collections, his most recent novel being 프롤로그 에필로그 (Prologue Epilogue, Munhak Dongnae, 2022). In 2012, his novel 어떤 작위의 세계  (A Contrived World, Moonji Publications, 2011; trans. Mah Euniji and Jeffrey Karvonen, Dalki Archive Press, 2016) won the Han Moo-sook, Dong-in, and Daesan Literary Awards, marking the first triple crown in Korean literature. He has participated in international residencies, including the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program and UC Berkeley’s Center for Korean Studies. Jung is a prolific English-to-Korean translator: In addition to his own literary works, Jung has more than fifty translations of books to his name.

Tae Rang Kim is a translator of Korean and Japanese. He grew up in South Korea, Japan, and the US and studied creative writing and comparative literature at Waseda University. In 2023 and 2024, he participated in Korean and Japanese translation workshops at the British Centre for Literary Translation Summer School, hosted by the University of East Anglia and led by translators Anton Hur and Polly Barton. Kim’s work has appeared in Asymptote.