* The Young Writer Award, Hankook Ilbo Literary Award, Daesan Literary Award

“Do you like cats?” Secret confessions in the middle of the night; gentle intruders who reveal the cracks in life

An Elegant Night and Cats is a short story collection by Son Bomi, who has won wide support from readers and the literary world with her detailed and sophisticated writing style. The collection of nine stories includes “A Walk,” which won the 46th Hankook Ilbo Literary Award, and “The Substitute.”

Son is an author who captures with precision the cracks in daily life, “calling attention not through words but through silence” (Shin Hyeongcheol, literary critic). In this collection, she describes in detail how life subtly changes through the intrusion of a mysterious being. With a clean, meticulous style, she writes down the process in which people who have lost conviction in themselves and others, due to changes in their daily life, rediscover themselves and relationships.

An Elegant Night and Cats will tell you about mysterious strangers and what seemed like a peaceful life, in the most fascinating voice to be found in Korean literature today.

Son Bomi was born in 1980 in Seoul. she won the 21st Century Literature New Writer’s Prize in 2009 , and she began her literary career by winning the Dong-A Ilbo Spring New Writers Contest for “Blanket” in 2011. she is the author of the short story collections A Lindy-Hop For Them, A Graceful Night and Cats, Fireflies of Manhattan, the novella The God of Chance, and the full-length novel Dear Ralph Lauren. She has won The 2012 Munhak dongne Young Writers’ Award, The 2013 Hankook Ilbo Literary Award, The 2014 Kim Junseong Literary Award and The 2017 Daesan Literary Award.