Korean Literature Book Club: Caregiving Stories with Kim Yudam and Sunnie Chae

When a woman enters a marriage, is her constant labour in the kitchen a form of care? When a dying old woman asks for jujubes from a tree that’s no longer hers, is her grandson’s efforts to obtain them his way of caring for her? In a hierarchical, patriarchal society, care can take many forms – some obvious and acknowledged, and some invisible and forgotten. In this special Book Club, we explore these many aspects of care and caregiving with author Kim Yudam, and translator Sunnie Chae.

Kim Yudam

Kim Yudam is a South Korean novelist whose fiction explores themes of care, gender, and social precarity through both literary realism and speculative imagination. She made her literary debut in 2016 with the short story Pin Carry, which won the Seoul Shinmun New Writer’s Contest. Her short story collections include Tambourine (2019) and Caring Mind (2022). She is also the author of Women at Ease (2021), No Curtain Call for Me (2022), and the speculative novella Space M (2024). She has received the Shin Dong-yup Literary Award and the Kim Yujeong Literary Award.

Sunnie Chae

Sunnie Chae is a neurodivergent translator based in Seoul. Her translation of Kim Yudam’s “Jujubes” was published in Words Without Borders in 2025, and she is currently working on a translation of “Comfortable Family” by the same author. She teaches at Ewha Womans University, and her work has also appeared in The Massachusetts Review.

Read Jujubes

Dinner will be provided half-hour before event

Hosted by the ANU Korea Institute