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E. J. Koh

Biography

E. J. Koh

E. J. Koh is the author of the novel THE LIBERATORS and the memoir THE MAGICAL LANGUAGE OF OTHERS (Tin House Books, 2020), which won a Washington State Book Award, Pacific Northwest Book Award, Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, and was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. Koh is also the author of the poetry collection A LESSER LOVE (Louisiana State University Press, 2017), a Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry Winner. She is a translator of Yi Won’s poetry collection THE WORLD'S LIGHTEST MOTORCYCLE (Zephyr Press, 2021), which won the Literature Translation Institute of Korea’s Translation Grand Prize. Her work has appeared in AGNI, the Atlantic, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, Slate, World Literature Today and elsewhere.

Koh earned her MFA at Columbia University in New York for Creative Writing and Literary Translation and her PhD at the University of Washington in English Language and Literature studying Korean American literature, history and film. Koh has received National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, American Literary Translators Association, and Kundiman fellowships. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

Books by E. J. Koh

The Liberators
by E. J. Koh - Fiction

At the height of the military dictatorship in South Korea, Insuk and Sungho are arranged to be married. The couple soon moves to San Jose, California, with an infant and Sungho’s overbearing mother-in-law. Adrift in a new country, Insuk grieves the loss of her past and her divided homeland, finding herself drawn into an illicit relationship that sets into motion a dramatic saga and echoes for generations to come. From the Gwangju Massacre to the 1988 Olympics, flashbacks to Korean repatriation after Japanese surrender, and the Sewol ferry accident, E. J. Koh’s exquisitely drawn portraits and symphonic testimony from guards, prisoners, perpetrators and liberators spans continents and four generations of two Korean families forever changed by fateful past decisions made in love and war.

The Magical Language of Others: A Memoir
by E. J. Koh - Memoir, Nonfiction

THE MAGICAL LANGUAGE OF OTHERS is a powerful and aching love story in letters, from mother to daughter. After living in America for over a decade, Eun Ji Koh’s parents return to South Korea for work, leaving 15-year-old Eun Ji and her brother behind in California. Overnight, she finds herself abandoned and adrift in a world made strange by her mother’s absence. Her mother writes letters, in Korean, over the years seeking forgiveness and love --- letters Eun Ji cannot fully understand until she finds them years later hidden in a box. Eun Ji fearlessly grapples with forgiveness, reconciliation, legacy and intergenerational trauma, arriving at insights that are essential reading for anyone who has ever had to balance love, longing, heartbreak and joy.