Korean author Han Kang delivers her Nobel Prize in Literature lecture at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on December 7, 2024. Image: © Nobel Prize Outreach, Anna Svanberg
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
MatchWhale: Trends, Themes in Korean Books
Releasing its first newsletter edition today (December 13), South Korea’s MatchWhale almost-new-year launch may ring a bell for you. We wrote about it in our Publishing Perspectives show magazine (see Page 16) at Frankfurter Buchmesse 2023, announcing a new service with a “whale-like” database of Korea’s books operating as both a distribution service and “rights-matching and management” facility created to spotlight some of the best Korean work available for international translation and rights acquisitions.
As many markets have learned (Norway, Finland, Italy, Brazil, and more), collective presentations of available titles and services can create strong go-t0 hubs for international publishing players looking for various markets’ strong titles with translation and publication rights available. And after some technical delays, the program now is ready for sign-ups from industry players interested in seeing what MatchWhale has to show them. And, of course, you can sign up at the site itself.
As the company puts it, with the newsletter’s biweekly updates, you can keep up with developments in the Korean book market, and you can do that here as well. By comparison to some government supported national-market programs of this kind, MatchWhale is a privately operated program.
The ‘Hidden Gems Worth Discovering’ page of the first newsletter from South Korea’s MatchWhale
The quickest way to get into touch might be through the first newsletter, just out today, and you can read it as a PDF here. In ensuing editions, information is expected to include updates on the previous month’s bestsellers and newly released titles. The data behind these features comes from South Korea’s three major online bookstores as well as National Library rankings.
The person behind all this work is GeumJoo Yongin Lin, who has put more than a year of work into developing MatchWhale. As she describes it, “MatchWhale can help you discover, explore, and connect with Korea’s rich literary world. If you’d like to dive deeper or have conversations about rights and opportunities, we’d love to hear from publishers around the world.” She can be reached at geumjoo.lin@thecomint.com
More than a simple catalogue, she tells us, the plan is for this to feature “Korean publishing trends, curated themes, author spotlights, and broader insights into Korean literature.” Yongin Lin also points out that some of the books in the newsletter or in MatchWhale’s listings “may already have exclusive representation agreements with other agencies.
GeumJoo Yongin Lin
“MatchWhales’s mission is to introduce Korean literature to a global audience and facilitate rights inquiries for interested parties. When we receive inquiries on rights, we confirm rights availability with the authors or publishers first and if exclusive agencies are in place, we direct inquiries to them accordingly.”
And how better to time your launch than with news of a favorite-daughter Nobel win?
As Publishing Perspectives readers know, Korea’s Han Kang this month has become the first Asian woman and the first Korean to be made a Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,” as the Swedish Academy put it.
And in her Nobel lecture, which she delivered on Tuesday in Stockholm (December 10), Kang spoke eloquently of her own experience of writing, saying (in a translation by e.yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris):
“When I write, I use my body. I use all the sensory details of seeing, of listening, of smelling, of tasting, of experiencing tenderness and warmth and cold and pain, of noticing my heart racing and my body needing food and water, of walking and running, of feeling the wind and rain and snow on my skin, of holding hands.
“I try to infuse those vivid sensations that I feel as a mortal being with blood coursing through her body into my sentences. As if I am sending out an electric current.
“And when I sense this current being transmitted to the reader, I am astonished and moved. In these moments I experience again the thread of language that connects us, how my questions are relating with readers through that electric, living thing of how when she writes, “I experience again the thread of language that connects us, how my questions are relating with readers through that electric, living thing.”
An auspicious moment, clearly, for GeumJoo Yongin Lin to launch her MatchWhale project, “a milestone honoring Han Kang’s profound exploration of humanity and existence,” she says. “Her iconic works, like The Vegetarian and Human Acts, delve deeply into themes of identity, resilience, and memory, showcasing the power of Korean literature on the global stage.”
And we’ll welcome Lin’s new ‘whale’ with our last Rights Roundup listings of 2024, thanking not only our readers but also the agents and rights directors and scouts (and friends who always have their finger on the pulse) for another year of deal news and engagement with our project here.
Wishing you the brightest and most restful holidays you’re looking for, and a great start to 2025, when we’ll be back with another year of Rights Roundup.
As in each roundup, we use some of the sales copy supplied to us by agents and rights directors, editing that copy to give you an idea about a book’s nature and tone, but limiting the promotional elements. If you’d like to submit a deal to Publishing Perspectives, see the instructions at the end of this article.
Mirabilis
By Anna Kytömäki
Reported rights sales:
- Newest – Italy: Marsilio in a pre-empt
- Denmark: People’s Press in a pre-empt
- Sweden: Norstedts in a pre-empt
Anna Kytömäki
“Mirabilis, the newest work by the Finlandia-winning author Anni Kytömäki, is a novel of great adventures, explorations, and human fates intertwining with the natural world.
“Set at the turn of the 20th century, Mirabilis is a family saga that deals with themes of unwanted motherhood, restlessness, and finding solace in the physicality of one’s own and a very particular, physical relationship to nature.”
Overall, Kytömäki’s international sales have gone into seven markets, and Mirabilis was published on September 1, the author’s fourth novel. In its first two months on the Finnish market, the book sold more than 8,000 printed copies. Urte Liepuoniute, familiar to many of our readers, is the agent to author and reindeer herder Juhani Karila.
Gaza Faces History
(Gaza devant l’histoire)
By Enzo Traverso
- Publisher: Lux Editeur, Montreal
- Rights contact: Marleen Seegers, 2 Seas Agency
- Book info: Read more here
Reported rights sales:
- Newest –Portugal: Antigona at auction
- World English: Other Press
- Italy: Laterza
- Greece: Ekdoseis tou Eikostou Protou
- Brazil: Ayine
- Germany: Wirklichkeit
Enzo Traverso
“In this urgent essay, historian Enzo Traverso contextualizes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, critiquing Western perspectives.
“Examining Gaza’s destruction as not just a response to the October 7, 2023, attack but also as part of a historical process of dispossession, Traverso questions narratives framing Israel as a democratic beacon and Hamas as purely fanatical, highlighting parallels with colonial violence.”
Also by Enzo Traverso: Singular Pasts: The ‘I’ in the Writing of History, in which he studies how “More and more, history is being written in the first person. Historians no longer simply reconstruct and interpret the past; they now feel the need to tell their own stories. The number of historians’ autobiographies has increased in the last century, and researchers have adopted a self-reflexive stance to better understand their own intellectual trajectory.
“A new hybrid genre has taken form, exemplified in particular by the works of authors such as Ivan Jablonka in France or Mark Mazower in the English-speaking world: historians recount their investigations and describe the emotions they stirred up in them, thus joining the novelists who borrow from the methods of historical investigation (Carrère, Cercas, W.G. Sebald, etc.).”
In the Middle of August
(Mitten im August)
By Luca Ventura
- Publisher: Diogenes Verlag, Zurich
- Rights contact: Susanne Bauknecht, Diogenes Verlag
- Book info: Read more here
Reported rights sales:
- Newest – Estonian: Tänapäev
- Arabic: Al-Arabi
- Catalan: Enciclopèdia Catalana
- French: Livre de Poche
- Italian: Giunti
- Spanish: Enciclopèdia Catalana
“Enrico Rizzi, a policeman on the island of Capri, usually deals with minor crimes.
“His quiet job means he can help his father in his fruit and vegetable garden above the Gulf of Naples. Until, in the middle of August, a rowing boat washes up on the rocky beach, containing a dead man – Jack Milani, an oceanography student and the son of a major industrialist family.
“It’s the first murder case for Rizzi, a case where the very future of the seven seas is at stake.”
Chiquitita
By Pedro Carmona-Alvarez
- Publisher: Kolon Forlag, Oslo
- Rights contact: Gina Winje, Winje Agency
- Book info: Read more here
Reported rights sales:
- Newest – Germany: Luchterhand
- Dutch: Uitgeverij Oevers
- English (UK): Akoya Publishing
- Hungarian: Polar Egyesület
- Brazilian-Portuguese: Nós Editora
- Serbian: Blum Izdavastvo
Pedro Carmona-Alvarez
“Chiquitita is a melancholy, poetic story about fleeing for one’s life, about the passage of time, and about the things in life that don’t disappear and come back to haunt us.
“Marisol is a middle-aged woman who is looking back on her life, at the young woman she once was, the woman who once broke down in front of a painting of a small dog in a big city museum.
“Marisol is a young woman on holiday with her boyfriend, her first love. They are in a museum in a big city and looking at a painting of a dog. Her boyfriend wants her to tell him about her life, her childhood, and the refugee child she once was. But she breaks down.
“Marisol is a child living with her mother and father in a city by the ocean. The parents are young, stylish, and living lives at the heart of the zeitgeist. The child often stays in her grandmother’s home, where she lives for long periods of time during her childhood, surrounded by aunts and uncles. Then the country collapses. She is picked up in the middle of the night and the small family must flee over the mountains into the bordering country. But they aren’t permitted to remain there, and while they wait for another country to admit them, they must live in a refugee camp full of shadows and ruptured stories.
“Then they come to Norway.
“A novel about impossible stories, trauma and violence, but also about hope and light and love.”
Tully and Roly the Pony
(Ystäväni Pulla Vehnänen)
By Ninka Reittu
- Publisher: Otava, Helsinki
- Rights contact: Hanna Pajunen-Walsh, Rights and Brands
- Book info: Read more here
Reported rights sales:
- Newest – Macedonian: Antolog Publishing House
- English (Mainland China): Poodle Doodle Press
- World Serbian: Kreativni Centar
- Denmark: Lindhart & Ringhof
- World German: Fischer Kinder- und Jugendtaschenbuch Verlag
- Czech Republic: Albatros Media
Ninka Reittu
“Tully and Roly the Pony is the first part of author-illustrator Ninka Reittu’s newest series that celebrates the wonders of friendship. It’s a story about understanding and accepting other people for who they are despite the differences.
“The narration is combined with vivid and bubbly illustrations. Tully and Roly the Pony is a picture book for storytime with any child who dreams of a pony of his or her own.”
Ninka Reittu’s previous work includes Messi and Mystery Cat and the Finlandia-nominated You Are Super Loved. Her books have been translated into nine languages to date.
The Dressmaker of Barcelona
(La modista de Gràcia)
- Publisher: La Campana, Barcelona
- Rights contact: Núria Herrero, The Foreign Office
- Book info: Read more here
Reported rights sales:
- Newest – Portugal: Kathartika
- World Spanish: Motus thriller
“Loreto is a native of the Gràcia neighborhood of Barcelona, with a modest family that works in one of the most important steamships of the city, La Sedeta.
Marc Font
“At 12, her parents take her out of school to set her up with Carles Vidal, the owner of the factory’s brother, with whom she’ll live the most traumatic and tragic episodes of her life. After an unexpected event, instead of making a living ironing for one of the great textile establishments in Barcelona, she decides to set up her own business as a wedding dressmaker. But when she receives her first order, the bride disappears three days before the wedding.
“Throughout the next decades, while Loreto manages to make a name for herself and gain prestige as a dressmaker, disappearances and deaths of brides continue to occur.
“One night in the present, Loreto bursts into her neighbor Xavi’s house wearing a white bathrobe covered in blood and asking for help. Left in shock by Loreto, he will investigate who his neighbor really is, Gràcia’s dressmaker.”
Submitting Rights Deals to Publishing Perspectives
Do you have rights deals to report? Agents and publishing-house rights directors can use our rights deal submission form to send us the information we need. If you have questions, please send them to Porter@PublishingPerspectives.com
We look forward to hearing from you.
More of Publishing Perspectives‘ rights roundups are here, and more from us on international rights trading is here.
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