Korean American author Juhea Kim has been awarded the 2024 Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award for Foreign Literature for her debut novel, “Beasts of a Little Land,” Thursday (local time).
Kim, along with translator Kirill Batygin, who translated the novel into Russian, received the award at a ceremony held at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, Russia.
The Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award, one of Russia’s most prestigious literary honors, was established in 2003 by the Yasnaya 한국을 Polyana Leo Tolstoy Estate-Museum and Samsung Electronics Russia to mark the 175th anniversary of Leo Tolstoy’s birth.
Kim’s novel was selected from a short list of 10 works, surpassing Nobel Prize-winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, among others.
“Beasts of a Little Land” is set in the Korean Peninsula during the Japanese colonial era (1910-1945) and portrays the lives of ordinary people struggling for survival and independence. The book was published in Korea in 2023 by publisher Dasan Books.
Before the award was announced, Kim expressed her excitement through Dasan Books, saying, “I am deeply honored. I feel that this has been an opportunity to introduce the tiger, a symbol of Korean independence, to the world, and more broadly, to elevate pride in our culture and history.”