INTERVIEW Irish author Danielle McLaughlin on exchange with Korean students and compelling visit to Jeju
Irish writer Danielle McLaughlin poses with a Korean translation of her novel "Dinosaurs on Other Planets" during an interview with The Korea Times at Korea University in Seoul, Monday. Korea Times photo by Lee Hae-rin
Award-winning writer is invited by Irish Embassy in Korea
When Irish writer Danielle McLaughlin received an invitation to visit Korea, she was deep into Nobel laureaute author Han Kang’s “We Do Not Part” (2021), a novel whose reckoning with the Jeju April 3 massacre had unsettled and moved her.
The timing felt like an invitation within an invitation.
“The minute I was invited, I knew I wanted to go,” she said during an interview with The Korea Times after leading a creating writing workshop at Korea University on Monday.
The Cork-based author, known for the award-winning short-story collection “Dinosaurs on Other Planets” (2015) and the novel “The Art of Falling,” (2021) visited Seoul as part of the Irish Embassy’s inititive to bring contemporary Irish writers to Korea.
The embassy began its exchange program in 2024 with the help of Literature Ireland, the country's state-funded organization promoting Irish writing abroad.
At Korea University on Monday, more than 50 students — many encountering McLaughlin’s work for the first time — packed into a classroom for a two-hour creative writing workshop.
The room’s enthusiasm was striking. Some students even sat on desks when seats ran out and others stayed after the program to continue asking questions about writer’s block and the fear of producing imperfect first drafts.
“The students were incredible. There was a lovely energy in the room, and they threw themselves so happily into attempting the exercise and talking about it,” McLaughlin said.
She connected with the students by recounting her own late and unexpected turn to fiction.
“Never think you’re not a writer. I thought writers were like unicorns, born just knowing how to write a story,” she told students. “But we can learn how to write.”
Irish writer Danielle McLaughlin speaks during a creative writing workshop for students organized by the Irish Embassy in Seoul at Korea University in Seoul, Monday. Korea Times photo by Lee Hae-rin
Her advice was practical and reassuring: read widely, write regularly, seek out a writing group and let a first draft be bad.
“Our writing is always really, really, really bad until it isn’t,” she said. “It’s about giving ourselves permission to be really embarrassingly honest in what we put down on the page.”
For McLaughlin, who came to fiction in her 40s after practicing law, the workshop also offered a familiar form of exchange. She also teaches creative writing courses and mentors emerging writers back home, dividing her time between writing and teaching.
“I learn so much from students,” she said. “Sometimes, if I find or help find an answer for a student … in a couple of months’ time I could be stuck on the very same problem in my own work.”
She described Ireland’s literary ecosystem supportive and vibrant, with public funding for mentorship programs, grants for writers seeking workshops or mentors, a busy circuit of literary festivals and a dense network of magazines open to emerging writers.
McLaughlin herself found an early route into publishing through The Stinging Fly, the influential Irish literary magazine that later published “Dinosaurs on Other Planets.” The book helped establish her internationally; in 2019, she received the Windham-Campbell Prize and the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award.
Irish writer Danielle McLaughlin speaks during a creative writing workshop for students organized by the Irish Embassy in Seoul at Korea University in Seoul, Monday. Korea Times photo by Lee Hae-rin
Despite an already packed week of Seoul engagements, McLaughlin carved out a single day for visiting Jeju Island. Han’s “We Do Not Part” stirred her curiosity about the island’s history and made the visit feel essential.
“I didn’t know about those massacres until I read the book,” she said. “I thought she conveyed everything so powerfully and managed to do it in a way that didn’t brutalize the reader. She holds the reader within this liminal or protected space where the reader is being told the story of such terrible atrocities.”
Flying early to the southern island and returning to Seoul late, she visited places where villages once stood but had been erased, an experience she described as “going to look at something that had been taken away.”
At a beach associated with the novel’s account of a massacre, she saw children playing under bright sunshine, a contrast that made the coexistence of historical trauma and everyday life feel immediate. “That movement between past and present — and how we do not part, as the book says — and the layer of history was with me when I was on the beach this beautiful sunny day,” she said.
She hopes to write something nonfictional about Jeju someday, though she does not yet know its form. For now, she plans to return to Han’s novel.
For McLaughlin, Han’s ability to carry readers through painful history without turning away from its weight speaks to the ethics she brings to her own writing. Even when a story moves through bleak territory, she said, she looks for room for humor, beauty and hope.
“I hope that I never brutalize a reader or leave them in despair,” she said. “I want them to go forward thinking that the world is still worth going forward with, even if it’s been a pretty difficult place in the novel or in the story.”
In an era when generative AI can produce polished text in seconds, McLaughlin said literature’s enduring value lies in the human connection.
“AI is never going to be able to achieve the same connection that a human can achieve,” she said. If more people approached the world with patience and inward attention that literature requires, “there would be higher levels of empathy and there would be less disagreement and less war,” she said.