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Lin King
American writer and translator From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Lin King (Chinese: 金翎; born December 6, 1993) is a Taiwanese and American writer and translator. She is fluent in Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and English, with some proficiency in Taiwanese.[1] In 2024, King and Taiwanese writer Yang Shuang-zi won the National Book Award for Translated Literature for the English translation of Taiwan Travelogue.[2]
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Early life and education
King was born in New York. She and her Taiwanese parents moved to Taipei when she was one year old.[3] King grew up in Taiwan as "part of the first generation to not have lived under martial law at all."[4] She holds both Taiwanese (ROC) and United States citizenship.
King attended Princeton University for her bachelor's degree in English with minors in Creative Writing and East Asian Studies. She subsequently attended Columbia University for a Master of Fine Arts in fiction and literary translation.[5]
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Career
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King's own writing in English has appeared in numerous publications including Joyland, Boston Review, and others.[6][7] In 2018, King received the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers for her short story, "Appetite", published in SLICE.[8] It was subsequently published in that year's edition of The PEN America Best Debut Short Stories.[9]
In 2023, King released an English translation of The Boy from Clearwater: Book 1 by Yu Pei-Yun and Zhou Jian-Xin, published by Levine Querido. She had read and worked with its translations in Taiwanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese.[4] Booklist, in a starred review, called it "a triumph of translation by gifted polyglot King, who artfully rendered the Taiwanese Hoklo, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese in the original."[10] It later won a Freeman Award in 2023.[11] The Boy from Clearwater: Book 2 received the same award in 2024.[12]
As a graduate student at Columbia University, King worked on Taiwan Travelogue with Yang, after which it was published in 2024 by Graywolf Press.[13] King had met Yang through the Asian American Writers' Workshop where King's translation of an excerpt from Yang's novel Seasons of Bloom appeared.[5] Yang then asked King to read and mull over Taiwan Travelogue in Mandarin Chinese for a possible translation, after which they pitched its English translation to numerous publishers before landing at Graywolf Press. There, Yang and King worked with Yuka Igarashi on calibrating the book's execution as a "meta-novel."[1][14]
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References
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