Hakuda Photo Studio
By (Author) Her Tae Yeon
Translated by Shanna Tan
John Murray Press
John Murray Publishers Ltd
29th July 2025
31st July 2025
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary
Paperback
240
Width 129mm, Height 198mm
Have you ever been on a summer holiday so good you never want to go home again
Jebi is tired of noisy, crowded Seoul and her dull job at a photography studio in the city. When she sees a billboard on her commute showing beautiful Jeju Island, she decides to quit her job and spend a summer there. On the last day of her trip, when she's due to fly back to her real life, she loses everything: phone, credit cards, plane ticket. Wandering through a fishing village, she stumbles across a tiny photo studio. Staying to work there, she meets and photographs a young couple who are about to get married, an elderly ex-cop haunted by questions from his past, and the Jeju haenyeos, a group of local women freedivers who gather sea urchins. The photos Jebi takes capture the magic of the island and its people.Her Tae-Yeon won the 11th Honbul Literary Award (the largest literary prize in Korea), for her novel The Man Who Dances Flamenco, written in memory of her late father.
Her most recent book, The Fairy Godmother of the Hand Me Down World, was a Korean bestseller.