Winter in Sokcho

Winter in Sokcho is the debut novel of Elisa Shua Dusapin, a writer of French and Korean heritage, translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. The unnamed narrator is a young French Korean woman who works as a receptionist at a tired guesthouse in Sokcho, a quiet seaside tourist town in South Korea close to the border with North Korea. In the off-season, a French cartoonist arrives as an unexpected guest, hoping the stark winter landscape will inspire his next book. The narrator, who has never met her French father, is drawn to the visitor, and an uneasy closeness grows between them as she guides him around the town. Written in spare, sensory prose filled with food, cold and the sea, the short novel explores identity, belonging and the bodies people inhabit. It won the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature.