Born in Seoul in 1980, Yun Ko-eun debuted as a novelistin 2003 when her short story “Piercing” won the Daesan Literary Award forCollege Students. In 2013, her first full-length novel The Zero G Syndrome received the Hankyoreh Literature Award. Shehas won a number of prestigious awards including the 2013 Lee Hyo-seok LiteraryAward (for “The Hippocampus, Fly”), the 2015 Kim Yong-ik Novel Prize (for“Aloha”), and the 2021 CWA Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger (for the Englishtranslation 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; thefull-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 “YunKo-eun’s EBS Book Café”, she has a chant bout books every day. She onceexplained, “The origin of my imagination can be traced all the way back to mymother’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 oftentore down boundaries. That’s where my stories began.”
