‘I have nothing to lose’: Korean author of 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster on writing her first novel, and its main character who’s ‘a bit violent’

Mirinae Lee, the writer of 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster, was inspired by a great-aunt – who escaped from North Korea alone – when crafting her protagonist

The Hong Kong-based author explains why she wrote the book, her debut novel, in English rather than Korean, and why its format lends itself to a film adaptation

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Hong Kong-based Korean author Mirinae Lee. She talks about how a great-aunt’s escape from North Korea inspired the protagonist of her debut novel, “8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster”. Photo: Mirinae Lee

Published: 7:15pm, 27 Nov 2023

Mirinae Lee is one of only a few writers from South Korea who publish in English rather than Korean. She does not do this because works in English have a bigger readership – it just works better as a literary device, explains Lee, the author of 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster.

“For a long time, I thought it would be almost impossible for a non-native speaker to write a novel in a foreign language,” she says. “I started writing the story in Korean, but it didn’t work very well. When I switched to English, however, it worked instantly.”

Lee graduated from university with a major in English literature in the United States and has lived in Hong Kong for 12 years.

Her debut novel, which hit stores in the UK in May 2023 and Hong Kong a month later, follows the life of a Korean woman during the Japanese colonisation of Korea (1910-1945), the Korean war (1950-1953) and the Cold War (1947-1991).

The book comprises eight separate, yet interconnected stories of an unnamed protagonist who claims to have been a slave, an escape artist, a murderer, a terrorist, a spy, a lover and a mother.