Don Mee Choi – författare

Winner of the National Book AwardIn DMZ Colony’s weave of words, artfully used oral history and typographic experimentation, increasingly words give way to her father’s documentary photos from the time of General Park Chung Hee’s brutal putsch and dictatorship, a regime supported by the USA. DMZ Colony expresses mourning, a resistance to empire, and a hope in humankind.‘Virtuosic in its range and empathy, this is a book that shifts the reader’s understanding of historical narrative from one of war to one of flight.’ Publishers Weekly, starred review

Shortlisted for the 2025 PEN Heaney Prize‘Mirror Nation offers the best of what poetry can provide—a new way of seeing.’ Firecracker Awards,Don Mee Choi delves into South Korea’s violent recent history, particularly the military’s massacre of hundreds of students taking part in the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, in a poetry of grief that is both personal and collective. Mirror Nation is a sorrowful reflection on the ways in which a place can hold a ‘magnetic field of memory’.‘Don Mee Choi draws on friendships, literature and documentary materials to elucidate the personal griefs we suffer under the assaults of empire. Formally explosive and emotionally harrowing, Mirror Nation is a riveting investigation into the coded images that fuse memories of different times and places.’ Forrest Gander, Poetry Society Book of the Year 2024‘From Ethiopia to Israel, Nicaragua to Afghanistan, she ties headlines and fragments using the equal sign, which she refers to as “a syntax that enables multiple places and times to coexist simultaneously.” Choi skilfully illustrates the cyclical, endless nature of violence to more deeply understand her home, herself, and the world.’ Publishers Weekly

Winner of the Big Other Award in TranslationWinner of MLA's 17th Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary WorkFormally audacious and remarkably compelling, Yi Sang’s works were uniquely situated amid the literary experiments of world literature in the early twentieth century and the political upheaval of 1930s Japanese occupied Korea. While his life ended prematurely at the age of twenty-seven, Yi Sang’s work endures as one of the great revolutionary legacies of modern Korean literature. Presenting the work of the influential Korean modernist master, this carefully curated selection assembles poems, essays, and stories that ricochet off convention in a visionary and daring response to personal and national trauma, reminding us that to write from the avant-garde is a form of civil disobedience.

Hardly War, Don Mee Choi's UK debut, defies categorisation. Using artefacts from Choi's father, a professional photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she combines memoir, image, and opera to explore her paternal relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters. Suggestive and subtle in its connections and allusions, there is an exhilarating freedom in its playful form, all while looking straight at the brutality of colonialism and dictatorship.‘A dark and upsetting but also funny-angry scrapbook . . . Choi has inherited her father’s journalistic sense for the right detail. She knows when to get out of the way and let the material speak for itself.’ Kathleen Rooney, The New York Times

I Knappt krig utövar Don Mee Choi en olydnadspoetik som öppnar upp snitt ur det förflutna med hjälp av språk och fotografi. Det är ett experimentellt och bångstyrigt översättningsarbete med utgångspunkt i det egna minnet, präglat av faderns bilder och berättelser från Vietnam- och Koreakrigen, liksom av film- och nyhetsmaterial. Don Mee Choi har under de senaste decennierna varit verksam som poet och översättare i skärnings­punkten mellan ett koreanskt och ett amerikanskt sammanhang. Knappt krig är hennes andra dikts­amling och utgör den första delen i en trilogi som kretsar kring Koreahalvöns samtidshistoria och den nykoloniala ordning som USA utövar i området. Knappt krig har översatts till svenska av Andjeas Ejiksson och Jennifer Hayashida.

***Winner of the 2025 CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry***Elegiac and haunting, Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi completes the KOR-US trilogy, along with Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016) and the National Book Award–winning DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020).Much like Proust's madeleine, a spinning Mercedez Benz ring outside Choi's Berlin window prompts a memory of her father on the Glienicker Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, which in turn becomes catalyst for delving into the violent colonial and neocolonial contemporary history of South Korea, with particular attention to the horrors of the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980. Here, photographs, news footage, and cultural artifacts comingle with a poetry of grief that is both personal and collective. Inspired by W. G. Sebald and Walter Benjamin as well as Choi’s DAAD Artists residency in Berlin, Mirror Nation is a sorrowful reflection on the ways in which a place can hold a “magnetic field of memory,” proving that history doesn’t merely repeat itself; history is ever present, chiming the hours in a chorus against empire.

Hardly War, Don Mee Choi's major second collection, defies history, national identity, and militarism. Using artifacts from Choi's father, a professional photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she combines memoir, image, and opera to explore her paternal relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters, conjoined to the belly of a warring empire. Like fried potato chips -- I believe so, utterly so -- The hush-hush proving ground was utterly proven as history -- Hardly=History -- I believe so, eerily so -- hush hush -- Now watch this performance -- Bull's-eye -- An uncanny human understanding on target -- Absolute=History -- loaded with terrifying meaning -- The Air Force doesn't say, hence Ugly=Narration -- Don Mee Choi is the author of The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and translator of contemporary Korean women poets. She has received a Whiting Writers Award and the 2012 Lucien Stryk Translation Prize. Her translation of Kim Hyesoon's Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (Action Books, 2014) was a finalist for the 2015 PEN Poetry in Translation Award. She was born in Seoul and came to the United States via Hong Kong.She now lives in Seattle, Washington.

WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY"Don Mee Choi's urgent DMZ Colony captures the migratory latticework of those transformed by war and colonization. Homelands present and past share one sky where birds fly, but 'during the Korean War cranes had no place to land.' Devastating and vigilant, this bricolage of survivor accounts, drawings, photographs, and hand-written texts unearth the truth between fact and the critical imagination. We are all 'victims of History,' so Choi compels us to witness, and to resist."--Judges CitationWoven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said's notion of "the intertwined and overlapping histories" in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book, Hardly War, it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind.

WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY"Don Mee Choi's urgent DMZ Colony captures the migratory latticework of those transformed by war and colonization. Homelands present and past share one sky where birds fly, but 'during the Korean War cranes had no place to land.' Devastating and vigilant, this bricolage of survivor accounts, drawings, photographs, and hand-written texts unearth the truth between fact and the critical imagination. We are all 'victims of History,' so Choi compels us to witness, and to resist."--Judges CitationWoven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said's notion of "the intertwined and overlapping histories" in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book, Hardly War, it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind.