Yun Ko-eun's 'The Disaster Tourist' wins UK's crime fiction award

Author Yun Ko-eun / Courtesy of Munhakdongne Publishing

By Park Han-sol

The cover of "The Disaster Tourist" (2020), written by Yun Ko-eun and translated by Lizzie Buehler / Courtesy of Serpent's Tail

Best-selling author Yun Ko-eun's novel, “The Disaster Tourist,” became the first Korean literary piece to win the prestigious crime fiction award in the UK, Thursday, local time.

The eco-thriller, translated into English last year through sponsorship of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea), was named the winner of the Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger category, awarded by the Crime Writers' Association (CWA).

“I was surprised to hear my name called and it feels like I just found a wormhole to another dimension,” Yun remarked at the online award ceremony. “I am willing to dive into this fantastic wormhole and write even more freely from now on.”

The CWA Daggers has celebrated quality crime writing since 1955 and is the country's longest-running prize for the genre, awarding works of both fiction and non-fiction in a total of eleven categories. The Translation Dagger category, for which “The Disaster Tourist” was nominated, invites international crime novels ― broadly defined to include thrillers, noir, suspense novels and spy fiction ― that have been translated into English for UK publication during the evaluation period.

Among the six shortlisted contenders of the category were Fredrik Backman's “Anxious People,” Agnes Ravatn's “The Seven Doors” and D. A. Mishani's “Three.”

Yun's thought-provoking narrative with a feminist edge follows Yona, who has worked for a decade as a programming coordinator at a peculiar travel agency called Jungle. The company specializes in offering package holidays to destinations ravaged by tsunamis, hurricanes and other natural disasters.

After being sexually assaulted by her colleague, Yona is presented with a curious offer by Jungle ― a free, week-long trip to a desert sinkhole in a remote island called Mui near Vietnam. She accepts the proposition, and during her excursion, she discovers the company's menacing plan to concoct an environmental catastrophe to add “dramatic excitement” to the vacation package.

Characterized by the CWA as “a wildly entertaining eco-thriller from South Korea that lays bare, with mordant humor, the perils of overdeveloped capitalism,” the book was included in TIME magazine's list of “12 New Books You Should Read in August” last year.

With “The Disaster Tourist,” Yun has joined a group of recent Korean recipients of notable international literary awards. Last year, Kim Young-ha's "Diary of a Murderer" won the German Prize for Crime Fiction, while Keum Suk Gendry-Kim became the winner of the Harvey Award for the Best International Book. Poet Kim Yi-deum's "Hysteria" was also the first work to take home both the 2020 U.S. National Translation Award and the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Award.