Deborah Smith: Wish it, believe it, and it will be so.

There’s something very freeing about losing the anchors that have always defined you. Frightening, sad, but exhilarating in a poignant way, as well. You’re free to float to the moon and evaporate or sink to the bottom of the deepest ocean. But you’re free to explore. Some people confuse that with drifting, I suppose. I like to think of it as growing.

Deborah Smith

insperational ocean inspirational

Happy people look young. You’re really afraid of getting older, aren’t you? You should only be afraid of getting less happy.

Deborah Smith

getting-older people looks

I read The Vegetarian and fell in love with it. A year later, I was invited to go and speak at the London Book Fair (which I'd never even heard of before), as they were gearing up for Korea being the market focus country in 2014. I met Max Porter there, Kang's editor at Portobello, sent him my sample, and the rest is history.

Deborah Smith

korea country book

Flattery is a lie covered in a bed of flowery words.

Deborah Smith

flattery bed lying

Instead of fearing what might happen if I failed, I should be excited about what could happen if I succeeded!

Deborah Smith

excited should might

We are all bodies of water, guarding the mystery of our depths, but some of us have more to guard than others.

Deborah Smith

depth body water

Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay is a stylistically daring writer in love with surrealism, credited with being 'the woman who reintroduced hardcore sexuality to Bengali literature'. But though the (male) establishment used this label of erotica to dismiss her work, the sex scenes have exactly the same transgressive function as her use of chronology and narrative voice.

Deborah Smith

narrative-voice males sex

The hardest memories are the pieces of what might have been.

Deborah Smith

pieces might memories

Life doesn't take itself seriously for long. Joy leaves an imprint even in the hardest sorrow.

Deborah Smith

sorrow joy long

The LORD detests lying lips, but he delights in men who are truthful. PROVERBS 12:22

Deborah Smith

delight men lying

I taught myself the first year course while I was on the dole, then moved to London to do an MA at SOAS, which led straight into a PhD.

Deborah Smith

taught london years

A chorus of tough southern belles whispered, You need a loyal husband around here. Loyal to you, loyal to your family, loyal to your land. I added, Good in bed, smart, and romantic. Politically, socially, and religiously compatible. And he had to want children.

Deborah Smith

smart husband children

A photograph is a souvenir of life!

Deborah Smith

souvenirs photograph

What do you call love, then?" Someone I can't live without.

Deborah Smith

i-can

Hwang Jung-eun is one of the brightest stars of the new South Korean generation - she's Han Kang's favourite, and the novel we're publishing scooped the prestigious Bookseller's Award, for critically-acclaimed fiction that also has a wide popular appeal. She stands out for her focus on social minorities - her protagonists are slum inhabitants, trans women, orphans - and for the way she melds this hard-edged social critique with obliquely fantastical elements and offbeat dialogue.

Deborah Smith

awards focus stars

I suspected learning a language would be both useful and enjoyable (I love memorising lists of things), and would get rid of the embarrassment of being monolingual at 21. I'd been obsessed with reading for as long as I could remember, the only thing I'd ever thought I might want to be was a writer, but I was much better at crafting sentences than at stringing plots together.

Deborah Smith

reading together long

All of which suggested literary translation, and Korean seemed a good bet - barely anything available in English, yet it was a modern, developed country, so the work had to be out there, plus the rarity would make it both easier to secure a student grant and more of a niche when it came to work.

Deborah Smith

korean students country

So the aim for the press was a mixture of things: to publish under-represented writing, which is an intersection of original language, style, content, and often its author's gender. To publish it properly, in a way that makes it clear that this is art, not anthropology. To spotlight the importance of translation in making cultures less dully homogenous.

Deborah Smith

style writing art

This and the small sample size inevitably leads to stereotypes - sweeping family sagas from India, 'lush' colonial romances from South-East Asia. Mother and daughter reconciling generational differences through preparing a 'traditional' meal together. Geishas. And even if something more exciting does manage to sneak through, it gets the same insultingly clichéd cover slapped on it anyway, so no one will ever know.

Deborah Smith

differences daughter mother

I did my BA in English lit, and hated the restriction - I'd always read more in translation than not; coming from a working-class background, what I knew of as British literature - the writers who made big prize lists and/or were stocked in WH Smith, Doncaster's only bookshop until I was 17 - seemed incredibly, alienatingly middle-class. Then in 2009, just after the financial crash, I graduated with no more specific skill than 'can analyse a bit of poetry'.

Deborah Smith

skills literature class