Anton Hur joins International Booker Prize panel as first Korean judge

Anton Hur (second from right) has been appointed as a judge for the International Booker Prize 2025. (Booker Prize Foundation)

Author and acclaimed translator Anton Hur has been appointed as a judge for the prestigious International Booker Prize for next year, becoming the first Korean to serve on the panel since the prize introduced its international category in 2005.

Hur joined the panel of five judges, chaired by bestselling author Max Porter, according to the Booker Prize Foundation on Wednesday. The panel includes Caleb Femi, a prize-winning poet, director and photographer, Sana Goyal, a writer and publishing director of the British literary magazine Wasafiri, and Beth Orton, an award-winning singer-songwriter.

The International Booker Prize 2025 longlist will be announced on Feb. 25, 2025, with books translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland between May 1, 2024 and April 30, 2025.

Hur's translation of Bora Chung's "Cursed Bunny" was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022 and was also a finalist for the US National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2023.

Additionally, his translation of Park Sang-young’s "Love in the Big City" was longlisted for the 2022 International Booker, making him the third translator in history make the longlist twice in the same year.

Hur's co-translation of "Beyond the Story: 10-Year History of BTS" debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times Bestseller List. His translations of Shin Kyung-sook’s "Violets" and Lee Seong-bok’s "Indeterminate Inflorescence" were consecutively longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2022 and 2023.

Hur recently debuted as a novelist with the English-language "Toward Eternity," a speculative work that explores what it means to be human in a world where technology is quickly catching up to biology. The book hit shelves worldwide on Tuesday.

Hur is currently on a book tour in the US and is scheduled for a UK tour in August.

By Hwang Dong-hee(hwangdh@heraldcorp.com)