Nowhere to Be Found

Nominated for the PEN Translation Prize and the Best Translated Book Award

A nameless narrator passes through her life, searching for meaning and connection in experiences she barely feels. For her, time and identity blur, and all action is reaction. She can’t quite understand what motivates others to take life seriously enough to focus on anything―for her existence is a loosely woven tapestry of fleeting concepts. From losing her virginity to mindless jobs and a splintered, unsupportive family, the lessons learned have less to do with the reality we all share and more to do with the truth of the imagination, which is where the narrator focuses to discover herself.

Bae Suah was born in Seoul in 1965. After majoring in chemistry as an undergrad, she became a writer at the relatively late age of twenty-eight. Her first short story, which she wrote while learning how to type on a word processor, was published in a literary magazine. Prior to that, she had never taken any creative writing or literature classes. Highway with Green Apples, published in Korean in 1995 and published in the Day One journal in December 2013 in English, is one of her first works. She continued to publish over the years, and in 2001 she moved to Berlin, where she took a break from writing to learn German. In 2008, she began translating German literature into Korean, beginning with Martin Walser’s Angstblute. Suah has also translated two works by W. G. Sebald, one of her favorite German writers (Nach der Natur: Ein Elementargedicht and Schwindel. Gefüehle, both forthcoming). She is also a fan of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa and is currently translating The Book of Disquiet.