Professor Jung Hayun of the Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation Selected for The Best American Essays 2026 N
- 작성처
- Date2026.10.15
- 159
An essay by Professor Jung Hayun of the Korean-English Translation major at Ewha Womans University’s Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation has been selected for The Best American Essays 2026.
The Best American series is a prestigious American literary anthology series established in 1915. Each year, it selects and publishes outstanding works across various genres including short stories and essays. This year’s series comprises six volumes, which will be published by HarperCollins on October 21 (Wednesday). Works published in literary magazines and current affairs publications across North America are reviewed annually. An initial selection process narrows the candidates down to 100 works, from which a guest editor selects the final 20.
This year’s essays editor, M. Gessen, a Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning journalist and New York Times columnist, explained that the final selections were made with a focus on “the role of essayists in engaging in subjective writing that interprets and contextualizes an objectified world.”
This year’s selections include works by British novelist Zadie Smith, New Yorker critic Hilton Als, and prominent critic Andrea Long Chu, among others. Professor Jung’s selected essay, “Besieged,” was published in October 2025 in World Literature Today, an A&HCI-indexed literary magazine. The essay offers a Korean perspective on the experience of martial law, which Koreans faced again in 2024 after having experienced it in the 1970s and 1980s.
Professor Jung Hayun is a translator, writer, and literary translation scholar. She has held a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and as a creative writing fellow in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin. She has received translation grants from the Daesan Foundation, the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, and PEN America, as well as the Korean Association of Translation Studies’ annual Outstanding Paper Award. She has published numerous essays and research papers in publications including Translation Review, The New York Times, and Harvard Review.