Swiss · b. 1992
Elisa Shua Dusapin is a Franco-Korean writer born in 1992 in Paris and raised in France, South Korea and Switzerland. She holds Swiss citizenship and writes in French. She studied at the Swiss Literature Institute in Bienne. Her first novel, Hiver à Sokcho (2016), is set in a guesthouse in a South Korean border town and follows a young woman who meets a French graphic novelist. Published in English as Winter in Sokcho, in Aneesa Abbas Higgins's translation, it won the Prix Robert Walser, the Prix Régine Deforges and the National Book Foundation's 2021 Translated Literature prize. Her later books include Les Billes du Pachinko (2018), translated as The Pachinko Parlour, and Vers la violence (2019). Her work is short, spare and attentive to silence, language barriers, family ties and life between cultures. She has become one of the more widely translated francophone Swiss authors of her generation.