Winter in Sokcho

Winter in Sokcho is a debut novel by Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated from the French.

Set during the off-season in Sokcho, a South Korean coastal town near the North Korean border, it follows a young French-Korean woman working as a receptionist at a guesthouse.

When a French cartoonist arrives seeking material and inspiration, an ambiguous, unsettled relationship develops between them, as he pursues a romanticised idea of 'authentic' Korea while she finds herself unseen by the very person whose attention she seeks.

Spare, atmospheric and psychologically acute, the novel explores identity, alienation and the gap between how we are seen and how we wish to be seen; it won the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature.