An interview with Krys Lee

An interview with alum  (fiction, ’08) about her debut novel, How I Became a North Korean, appears at The Guardian:

Krys Lee’s debut novel, How I Became a North Korean, opens with a description of a lavish banquet hosted in Pyongyang by the dictatorial “Dear Leader”. The guests wear fur coats and Rolex watches, and sit at a mahogany table, eating delicacies flown in from the Tokyo Tsukiji fish market by private jet. Following the meal, the host raises his hand: “a glittering disco globe came down from the ceiling and the Joy Brigade began strutting in pink hot pants to a banned American pop song”. One couple, a senior party official and his wife, whose story we are following, are among those obliged to dance. Suddenly the mood changes, and the evening ends with the official shot dead, and his wife and son, Yongju, forced to flee the totalitarian state across the heavily patrolled border into China.

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