Subscribe to get access
Read more of this content when you subscribe today.
Kim Myeong-sun was the first woman writer in modern Korean literary history. There are not many photographs that remain of her: short hair, a faint smile on firmly closed lips, and eyes that must have carried a daring gaze, if only we could see them in colour.
As we mark the soft launch of this issue in recognition of International Women’s Day and its call to Give to Gain, Nabillera turns toward the idea of reciprocity: what we offer one another through language, what we inherit, and what becomes possible when knowledge is carried forward through care, mentorship, and translation.
It was October 2025 when Yun Ko-eun and I met at Fairshot Café in Covent Garden. She greeted me with a polite but warm bow as if I was her long-time friend she hadn’t seen in a while.
Three Poems by Beth Eunhee Hong: bruises, new speech, quiet sunshine.
The three poems that follow—bruises, saemal, and quiet sunshine—are written as a conversation with what resists easy language. They move through questions of identity, memory, and the quieter afterlives of trauma: how harm imprints itself in the body and how to translate the seemingly untranslatable.