Life doesn't take itself seriously for long. Joy leaves an imprint even in the hardest sorrow.

Life doesn't take itself seriously for long. Joy leaves an imprint even in the hardest sorrow.

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.

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.

Plus, publishing's inherent conservatism, means that what little did get through was weighted towards the commercial end of the scale, which is not the kind of writing that excites me.

All of which suggested literary translation, and Korean seemed a good bet - barely anything available in English, yet it was a modern, developed country, so the work had to be out there, plus the rarity would make it both easier to secure a student grant and more of a niche when it came to work.

I taught myself the first year course while I was on the dole, then moved to London to do an MA at SOAS, which led straight into a PhD.