Anton Hur
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antonhur.com
Anton Hur
@antonhur.com
14K followers 840 following 3.3K posts
Translator, novelist, Korean citizen. TOWARD ETERNITY (HarperVia), <하지 말라고는 안 했잖아요?> (어크로스). Repped by Safae El-Ouahabi at RCW. He/him.

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antonhur.com
He asked for the foreman, and looked round among the new traceries, mullions, transoms, shafts, pinnacles, and battlements standing on the bankers half worked, or waiting to be removed. They were marked by precision, mathematical straightness, smoothness, exactitude: there in the old walls were the broken lines of the original idea; jagged curves, disdain of precision, irregularity, disarray. For a moment there fell on Jude a true illumination; that here in the stone yard was a centre of effort as worthy as that dignified by the name of scholarly study within the noblest of the colleges. But he lost it under stress of his old idea. He would accept any employment which might be offered him on the strength of his late employer’s recommendation; but he would accept it as a provisional thing only. This was his form of the modern vice of unrest.
January 7, 2026 at 6:11 AM
antonhur.com
post a perfect album from the 90s that isn't nirvana, pearl jam, soundgarden, or alice in chains

Also I have literally never listened to a nirvana, pearl jam, soundgarden, or alice in chains album IN MY LIFE
Erykah Badu Live
December 29, 2025 at 2:36 AM
antonhur.com
This is such a weird thing to say about my novel. It is not "infused with Koreanness" at all, it's not even set in Korea and there's only one Korean character among many. What does "infused with Koreanness" even mean? I doused my novel in kimchi seasoning? There's no reasoning of it anywhere.
Although written in English, “Toward Eternity” is infused with Koreanness. This quality seems unironic and without apology, even when it feels forced. Twenty years earlier, “Cloud Atlas” had used Korea as a central setting for one of its storylines, set in the future. It may have been the first major novel in English to conceptually associate Korea with “sci-fi futuristic.” In Korea itself, science fiction as a genre was quite marginal, underdeveloped and without much respect until a trend got going in the mid-2010s. The 1982 film “Blade Runner,” another work from which “Toward Eternity” seems to draw inspiration, famously featured a dystopic futurescape heavily influenced by Japan. It was, in part, an interpolation of the direction Asian megacities would go. Japan may have been seen as futuristic in 1982. Korea was not. But a few decades later, Korea has built a similar image. Commentators often talk about how today’s Seoul can at times have a sci-fi feel. Some of the city’s showpiece areas and general feeling can draw parallels to cyberpunk. Maybe the recent rise of interest in translated Korean science fiction makes sense. Whatever we make of it, Hur’s Korean-infused science fiction novel is a part of that trend.
December 29, 2025 at 2:18 AM
antonhur.com
Cher once said in an interview that she sees herself as a fundamentally lazy person to the point where she has to be forced to do things, and that has always resonated with me because people think I’m extremely productive but honestly it’s pure torture working through a brain fog every single day—
Cover of a feminist’s guide to ADHD How women can thrive and find focus in a world built for men by Dr. Janina Maschke
December 26, 2025 at 5:47 AM
antonhur.com
Being a translator to become an author is, in retrospect, a hilarious way to become an author, because becoming a translator is much harder than becoming an author, which is why published authors overwhelmingly outnumber published translators.
It's sometimes said that a literary translator is really someone waiting to write their own novel. In an essay published in Korean in 2023, Hur confirmed as much about himself. He had gotten into literary translation, he wrote, with a mind to hang around the scene until he could publish his own novel.
December 26, 2025 at 4:58 AM
antonhur.com
Headlines saying Elon Musk plans to send humans to Mars in 2024
December 25, 2025 at 6:26 AM
antonhur.com
I’ve been sending this to a lot of blocked writers lately as Knausgård speaks to my experience in how I found a solution. I learned this from Lee Seong-bok so it’s fascinating how writers from vastly different places just have the same methodology vt.tiktok.com/ZSPvDrVDu/
December 23, 2025 at 11:56 PM
antonhur.com
The Day EM Forster Died by AS Byatt ftp.unz.com/PDF/PERIODIC...
ON A SUMMER DAY IN 1970, then, Mrs Smith, as was her habit when her children were at school, was writing in the London Library. (She preferred to divide art and life. She liked to write surrounded by books, in a closed space where books were what mattered most. In her kitchen she thought about cooking and cleanliness, in her living-room about the children's education and different temperaments, in bed about her husband, mostly.) She had various isolated ideas for things she might write about. There was a story which dealt with the private lives of various people at the time of the public events of the Suez landings and the Russian invasion of Hungary. There was a tragi-comedy about a maverick realist painter in a Fine Art Department dedicated to hard-edge abstract work. There was a tale based, at a proper moral distance, on her husband's accounts, from his experience in his Government Department, of the distorting effects on love, marriage and the family of the current complicated British immigration policy. There was a kind of parody of The Lord of the Rings which was designed to show why that epic meant so much to so many and to wind its speech into incompatible "real" modern events. None of these enterprises attracted her quite enough. She sat on her not comfortable hard chair at the library table with its peeling leather top and looked from shelved dictionaries to crimson carpet to elegantly sleeping elderly gentlemen in leather armchairs to the long windows on to St James's Square. One of these framed a clean, large Union Jack, unfurled from a flagpole on a neighbouring building. The others were filled by the green tossing branches of the trees in the Square and the clear blue of the sky. (Her metabolism was different in summer. Her mind raced clearly. Oxygen made its way to her brain.) It was suddenly clear to her that all her beginnings were considerably more interesting if they were part of the same work than if they were seen separately. The painter's aesthetic problem was more complicated in the same story as the civil servant's political problem, the Tolkien parody gained from being juxtaposed, or interwoven with a cast of Hungarian refugees, intellectuals and Old Guard, National Servicemen at Suez and Angry Young Men. They were all part of the same thing. They were part of what she knew. She was a middle-aged woman who had led a certain, not very varied but per-ceptive, life, who had lived through enough time to write a narrative of it. She sat mute and motionless, looking at the trees and the white paper, and a fantastically convoluted improbably possible plot reared up before her like a snake out of a magic basket, like ticker-tape, or football results out of the television teleprinter.
December 23, 2025 at 7:07 AM
antonhur.com
Traduction par Gilles Goullet! www.albin-michel-imaginaire.fr/livre/progra...
Couverture de Programme éternité
December 23, 2025 at 6:53 AM
antonhur.com
I know I’m prolific but I think I would remember if I ever wrote a cookbook about macarons
AI slop with Anton Hur’s name on it available on Kindle Unlimited
December 18, 2025 at 1:41 PM
antonhur.com
2025 Anton Hur Gift Guide

or

Everything I Published in 2025
December 16, 2025 at 2:13 PM
antonhur.com
We all know how great the French are at protecting cultural assets
Notre Dame on fire
December 8, 2025 at 1:10 PM
antonhur.com
I got my copy at Third Place Books (Lake Forest Park) in Seattle a couple of weeks ago, it was wonderful to buy one of Omar’s book at a physical bookstore, and this one at that. A book that is both a record of this genocide and a lived history of how we felt and how we continue to feel.
A hand holds up a copy of THE NIGHTMARE SEQUENCE by Omar Sakr at a bookstore.
December 1, 2025 at 10:16 AM
antonhur.com
lisa simpson staring down in horror
November 28, 2025 at 3:53 AM
antonhur.com
짧은 소설을 썼습니다.

“제국은 그런 곳이다. 우리가 이 아름다운 캠퍼스에서 문학에 흠뻑 빠져 있는 동안 제국의 또 다른 속국은 팔레스타인 가자 지구에 민간인 대학살을 진행한다.” www.munhwa.com/article/1154...
브래드 로프 캠퍼스
November 24, 2025 at 12:01 PM
antonhur.com
일반 소설이 아닌 과학 소설 섹션으로 분류될 때 L Ron Hubbard 옆에 꽂힌답니다 🥲

이참에 너무 아끼는 나머지 메고 다니지도 못하는 조라 닐 허스튼 에코백 자랑합니다…
아미스타드 출판사에서 만든 조라 닐 허스톤 에코백. 아미스타드 로고와 허스톤 작가의 얼굴이 그려져 있다.
November 23, 2025 at 3:01 AM
antonhur.com
In 2012, Larry Summers said in an NYT op-ed that my bilingualism would become useless.

In 2025, I still have a full-time job as a translator and he is unemployed.
English's emergence as the global language, along with the rapid progress in machine translation and the fragmentation of languages spoken around the world, make it less clear that the substantial investment necessary to speak a foreign tongue is universally worthwhile. While there is no gainsaying the insights that come from mastering a language, it will over time become less essential in doing business in Asia, treating patients in Africa or helping resolve conflicts in the Middle East.
November 20, 2025 at 4:30 PM
antonhur.com
Thank you for alerting me to its existence!
Anton shot from below with the surreal Turrell aperture glowing blue above him in a white ceiling
November 16, 2025 at 9:46 PM
antonhur.com
My favorite thing I saw in the Seattle Art Museum
A REUSE REVOLUTION: GUNYBI GANAMBARR'S EXPERIMENTS When Ganambar was a young man, senior Yolngu artists recognized his creative abilities and infused him with the knowledge he needed to create extraordinary bark paintings. By 2006, his technical skills enabled him to add layers of complexity that proved to be just the beginning of his waves of innovation. Previously, Yolngu people had an allegiance to using only materials that naturally occurred in their environment. Ganambar appealed to his elders to sanction his use of wasted industrial materials that he found left at mining sites by outsiders. The results merge time-honored images with new and often unexpected mediums for sculpture. Intricate repeating patterns etched into a discarded satellite dish Intricate repeating patterns etched into a discarded piece of rubber conveyor belt Close up of intricate bird feet pattern etched in metal
November 16, 2025 at 12:32 PM
antonhur.com
I’m in Seattle (visiting family). There are people walking around in tank tops in this weather. No umbrellas. They just come in here, semi-drenched, and order a drip coffee while grunge rock blasts in the background. Love this midcentury futurist monorail. Here just for the weekend 💜✨
monorail train going by in rainy Seattle
November 14, 2025 at 4:38 PM
antonhur.com
I am going to scream
He brought up the example of a child who comes to the word "horse" and says "pony" instead. His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept. I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn't the same thing as a horse. Second, don't you want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p//o//n//y/ says "pony"? And different letters say "horse"? He dismissed my question. "The purpose is not to learn words," he said. "The purpose is to make sense."
November 11, 2025 at 10:19 PM
antonhur.com
Seoul autumn
Pagoda tiled wall going through a garden with red and orange Korean maple, carpeted by yellow gingko leaves Red Korean maple against blue sky and the dark pagoda roof tiles of an awning
November 10, 2025 at 2:39 PM
antonhur.com
💜✨ www.theguardian.com/us-news/live...
highlighted text: These are the people who fought for Mamdani when he was polling at 1%, who celebrated his socialist principles when others said they disqualified him. As his speech played, there was a sense not just of political hope but a project come to fruition, the work of a lifetime building to a moment that might change the city
November 5, 2025 at 9:51 PM
antonhur.com
Seolyeon Park (CAPITALISTS MUST STARVE, A MAGICAL GIRL RETIRES) and me at City of Sanctuary Sheffield, courtesy of Juno Books Sheffield. A loving, lovely space 💜
Anton amd Seolyeon Park sitting in front of a big banner that says SHEFFIELD WELCOMES REFUGEES
October 22, 2025 at 11:10 PM
antonhur.com
MIND THE GAP

between the prose and the passion
London Tube warning mind the gap on the platform. There is a huge gap between platform and train.
October 22, 2025 at 2:57 PM