Dr Karolina Watroba, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Modern Languages at All Souls College, has received a British Academy Talent Development Award for her ongoing research project 'Kafka in Korea'. She will spend two months in Seoul in the summer, attending an intensive language course to further develop her Korean language skills and researching the wide-ranging creative reception of Franz Kafka in contemporary Korean literature as a case study in the dynamic of transcultural exchange, inequalities on the world literary market, and how literary brands, such as the 'Kafkaesque' and the 'Korean Wave', interact.
Karolina will present her ongoing work on Kafka in Korea in April as the winner of the Ann Moss Early Career Keynote Lecture Competition, selected by the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University as 'a researcher whose early achievements have already made significant impact on the field, and whose research raises innovative questions and opens new pathways of thinking about the future of Modern Languages'.
Image: Bae Suah has translated some works by Franz Kafka into Korean, and her multilingual novella 'Millena, Millena, Hwangholhan' (Seoul: Theoria, 2016) mixes a Korean text with quotations from Kafka's letters to Jesenská, which themselves mix German and Czech. Deborah Smith's English translation was published as 'Milena, Milena, Ecstatic' (Norwich: Strangers Press, 2019).