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

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.

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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...