Born in Seoul in 1980, Yun Ko-eun debuted as a novelist in 2003 when her short story “Piercing” won the Daesan Literary Award for College Students. In 2013, her first full-length novel The Zero G Syndrome received the Hankyoreh Literature Award. She has won a number of prestigious awards including the 2013 Lee Hyo-seok Literary Award (for “The Hippocampus, Fly”), the 2015 Kim Yong-ik Novel Prize (for “Aloha”), and the 2021 CWA Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger (for the English translation of The Disaster Tourist). Yun is the author of the short story collections Table for One, Aloha, The Old Car and Hitchhiker, and If Pyongyang Were on Monopoly; the full-length novels The Zero G Syndrome, The Disaster Tourist, A Pirated Copy, and Library Runway; and the essay collection The Warmth of the Void. As the host of the radio program “Yun Ko-eun’s EBS Book Café”, she has a chant bout books every day. She once explained, “The origin of my imagination can be traced all the way back to my mother’s cabbage salad in my childhood. In an effort to make me eat more salad, she would engage me in the “What’s This?” game, and the answers I gave often tore down boundaries. That’s where my stories began.”
