Cursed Bunny

"Cursed Bunny was one of three collections of short stories that were on the longlist, and is the only collection of short stories to make the shortlist. It’s extraordinary. I did an interview with a Korean journalist who asked why we chose this book when it’s genre fiction. They said ‘we don’t take such things seriously in Korea.’ As we discussed earlier, we don’t really take these things seriously in the Anglophone world, either, but we should. The writings of Edgar Allan Poe , for example, was sufficiently important that the great poet Charles Baudelaire translated them into French. He didn’t do that because the thought they were minor pieces of genre fiction, he thought that the way in which Poe used imagery and language was not only crucial, but entirely chimed with the poetry he was writing in the mid-19th century. What’s extraordinary about Bora Chung’s stories is that, on the surface, they are horror stories that brush the boundaries of science fiction—they all have fantastical elements—but they are very much rooted in human emotion, in fear and need and love and want. So they speak as directly to the human experience as anything else, in the same way as do David Cronenberg’s stories, or Iain M Banks. What’s amazing about them is not simply the extraordinary imagination that gives rise to them as works of fantasy, but the humanity in which they are grounded, and which makes them stick in your mind long after you read them. The experience of reading them is profoundly and viscerally affecting and moving. So, yes, she’s an extraordinary talent and Anton did an exemplary piece of work. Because so often in a collection of short stories there will be a range of styles and voices which can be very different, and may call upon you to be grave or sinister but at other points to be funny or facetious, and he handled all of that very well."