Our runner-up for the title of most widely read article of 2025—also courtesy of Assistant Interview Editor Sarah Gear—is our interview with Anton Hur from the Spring issue. A Korean-English translator who debuted in our pages nine years ago, Hur’s work includes Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee, I Decided to Live as Me by Kim Suhyun, and Beyond the Story: 10-Year History of BTS (number one in the NYT’s 2023 bestseller list). Hur is a literary force with much to learn from, this enlightening interview takes us through his writing, thoughts on language, AI, activism, and his role as a judge for the International Booker prize.
Gear points to Hur’s blog as a boon full of advice for emerging translators, such as how to draft successful pitches to publishers, amongst other notes. In this interview, for one, Hur acknowledges the frustrations of the current publishing industry that is, to no one’s surprise, “racist and sexist and homophobic and xenophobic.” This is a gap that can be addressed by hiring more translators of color and those working from their heritage languages—Hur’s success is a testament against native-speaker elitism in the translation space.
In 2025, Hur has translated the likes of Bora Chung, Le Young-do, Sung-il Kim, Kim Choyeop and Park Seolyeon. With ‘at least five’ titles slated for 2026, Hur’s writing is the gift that keeps on giving. That includes, of course, his own exceptional novel, Toward Eternity.
The discussion of this novel offers profound takeaways. The plot explores the larger role of language and poetry through an AI machine named Panit, who learns how to understand poetry. Toward Eternity, as described by Gear, “explores the nature of what it is to be human and, I would argue, the intrinsic importance of literature—a reflection of Hur’s academic background in Victorian poetry, his experience of translation, and his belief in the power of language.”
