Elisa Shua Dusapin and Aneesa Abbas Higgins in Conversation with Dr Sandra van Lente

Birmingham Lit Fest Presents….

In this podcast, we’re joined by novelist Elisa Shua Dusapin, whose debut novel Winter in Sokcho was translated and published in the UK this year. In conversation with Dr Sandra van Lente and joined by her translator Aneesa Abbas Higgins, they discuss shared identities, isolation and the relationship between writing and translation.

The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast brings writers and readers together to discuss some of 2020’s best books. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions
about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Join us each week for exciting and inspiring conversations with new, and familiar, writers from the Midlands and beyond.

Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/

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Credits

Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Guest Curator: Kit de Waal
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands

TRANSCRIPT

BLF Podcast Transcription, Episode 13: Elisa Shua Dusapin and Aneesa Abbas Higgins

Kit de Waal

Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast series. I’m Kit de Waal and I’ve worked with the Festival Director, Shantel Edwards, as Guest Curator of this year’s podcast series. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. In this podcast, we’re joined by novelist Elisa Shua Dusapin, whose debut novel Winter in Sokcho was translated and published in the UK this year. Elisa’s novel follows a young French-Korean woman who works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse in a deserted tourist town on the border between South and North Korea, and the uneasy relationship she forms with a French man who checks into the hotel. Joined by her translator, Aneesa Abbas Higgins, they discuss shared identities, isolation and the relationship between writing and translation.

Pro Helvetia Message

This episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast is supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

Sandra van Lente

Thank you all for tuning in. My name is Sandra van Lente. I'm a freelance cultural project manager and academic who works on the lack of diversity in the publishing industries. I have the great pleasure to introduce you to today's guests on the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast series, Elisa Shua Dusapin and Aneesa Abbas Higgins. Elisa Shua Dusapin is a Franco Korean author who lives in Switzerland and wrote the novel Winter in Sokcho which we will be talking about today. Her debut novel was originally written in French and published by the Swiss indie publisher Editions, Zurich. Winter in Sokcho was translated into 13 languages if I'm not mistaken, among them English, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins and published by Daunt Books, and German, translated by Andreas Jandl and published by Blumenbar. Elisa has won several prizes for her novels, among them the Robert Walser prize, the Prix Alpha and the French Prix Régine Desforges for Winter in Sokcho. She has two more novels out that we might hear about more later.

Aneesa Abbas Higgins is a literary translator and translates from French to English. She spends most of her time between London and a small village in France. In addition to Elisa Shua Dusapin’s novel, she has also translated from Tahar Ben Jelloun, Nina Bouraoui and Vénus Khoury-Ghata. Her translations won several awards, for example, her translation of the Goncourt winner, What Became of the White Savage by François Garde, and a translation of A Girl Called Eel by Ali Zamir, which was published by the indie publisher Jacaranda books in 2019. Aneesa has kindly agreed to translate those of Elisa's answers that she might give in French today. Thank you both for joining us for this podcast. Can we please start with you, Elisa, and how you became an author. So how and why did you start writing?

Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)

She never, it wasn't that she specifically always wanted to become a writer. It was more questions that she had herself about the multicultural upbringing that she'd had being a mixture of Korean and French. So, when she was 13 she went to Korea for the first time and it came as quite a shock to her to realize that her family was not unique that there were plenty of other people in the world like her and it made her start thinking about things and it made her start to read a great deal and as she was reading she began to realise that writing might be a way of addressing the questions that she had about her own identity. So, Elisa was very lucky to have some wonderful teachers when she was in high school who encouraged her to write and she began writing - never thought about writing a novel - she was writing short texts that were to do with her French Korean identity. And it gradually grew into what became the novel Winter in Sokcho that, in fact, she wrote between the ages of 17 and 21. But she never thought about getting it published. And it wasn't published until she was 23 and that again was on the encouragement of a former teacher.

Sandra van Lente

Thanks a lot for sharing this Elisa. So, can you share with us, what did you set out to explore in your first novel?

Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)

She wanted to write, create a character who was something of a mirror image of herself. The opposite in a way but the same, so a young woman who had grown up in Korea, and who knew the French language through literature and studying and who also had this feeling of being a foreigner, a stranger in her own land even though she understood the culture and the language and that she had the same feeling of being out of place, but in two places also. She started writing this as she was coming out of adolescence at an age when we're thinking a great deal about our body, our relationship to our body, body image, our own image and she wanted to write something about the violence really that is done to women in South Korea in terms of the pressure to have plastic surgery done on one's face to make one conform to a certain image and how the young woman, the character in her novel relates to all of this violence and body image and pressure to have one's face look a certain way.

Sandra van Lente

Was there a character that you found more difficult to write than the others, Elisa, and if so, why?

Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)

The male character Kerrand was the most challenging, not so much difficult, but he was a character who she didn't first imagine that he would have to have a whole life story, a history, be a fully rounded person, she just wanted him to be there as an example of the male ga...