| Lin King | |
| Education: | Princeton University (BA) Columbia University (MFA) |
| Occupation: | Writer, translator |
| Awards: | Freeman Award National Book Award for Translated Literature |
| Website: | https://www.lin-king.net/ |
Lin King ; born 1993) is a Taiwanese American writer and translator. She is fluent in Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and English, with some proficiency in Taiwanese, and has professionally commanded the four languages in her translations.[1] In 2024, King and Taiwanese writer Yang Shuang-zi won the National Book Award for Translated Literature for their joint writer-translator effort on Taiwan Travelogue.[2]
King was born in New York in 1993. She and her Taiwanese parents moved to Taipei when she was one.[3] King grew up in Taiwan in the nineties and 2000s; she is "part of the first generation to not have lived under martial law at all." She learned about Taiwan's history through her family: her maternal grandparents were Japanese citizens, and her mother was educated under the Kuomintang education system.[4]
Later, King attended Princeton University for her bachelor's degree in English with minors in Creative Writing and East Asian Studies. She subsequently attended Columbia University for an MFA in fiction and translation.[5]
King's own writing in English has appeared in numerous publications including Joyland, Boston Review, and others.[6] [7] In 2018, King received the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers for her short story, "Appetite", published in SLICE.[8] It was subsequently published in that year's edition of The PEN America Best Debut Short Stories.[9]
In 2023, King released an English translation of The Boy from Clearwater by Yu Pei-Yun and Zhou Jian-Xin, published by Levine Querido. She had read and worked with its translations in Taiwanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese. Booklist, in a starred review, called it "a triumph of translation by gifted polyglot King, who artfully rendered the Taiwanese Hoklo, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese in the original."[10] It later won a Freeman Award in 2023.[11]
As a graduate student at Columbia University, King worked on Taiwan Travelogue with Yang, after which it was published in 2024 by Graywolf Press.[12] King had met Yang through the Asian American Writers' Workshop where King's translation of an excerpt from Yang's novel Seasons of Bloom appeared. Yang then asked King to read and mull over Taiwan Travelogue in Mandarin Chinese for a possible translation, after which they pitched its English translation to numerous publishers before landing at Graywolf Press. There, Yang and King worked with Yuka Igarashi on calibrating the book's execution as a "meta-novel."[13]