We publish books that matter — narrative and literary nonfiction on important topics, and the best of local, international, and translated fiction.

We are thrilled to announce that Winter in Sokcho has won the 2021 US National Book Award for Translated Literature. Winter in Sokcho is a beautiful, unexpected novel from debut French-Korean author Elisa Shua Dusapin and translated from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins.

Elisa Shua Dusapin was born in France in 1992 and raised in Paris, Seoul, and Switzerland. Winter in Sokcho is her first novel. Published in 2016 to wide acclaim, it was awarded the Prix Robert Walser and the Prix Régine Desforges and has been translated into six languages.

Aneesa Abbas Higgins has translated books by Elisa Shua Dusapin, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Ali Zamir, and Nina Bouraoui. Seven Stones by Vénus Khoury-Ghata was shortlisted for the Scott-Moncrieff Translation Prize, and both A Girl Called Eel by Ali Zamir and What Became of the White Savage by François Garde won PEN Translates awards.

Judges Citation
This spare and visceral novel evokes the atmosphere of abandonment and isolation as well as the stark beauty of winter in a provincial South Korean seaside resort town near the North Korean border. Narrated by a sharply observant young French Korean resident, the story explores rifts of identity—personal, cultural, and national—and the fleeting kinship that is possible between solitary strangers. Aneesa Abbas Higgins’s elegant translation brings out the lyricism of Elisa Shua Dusapin’s tender and mysterious novel.