Friday, 4-5:30pm and 7:30-9pm at diffrakt | centre for theoretical periphery

Crellestraße 22

“Writing Queer Diaspora” – Workshop, Reading and Conversation with Lee Langvad

How to convey ordinary diasporic experience, its multiple and intervowen layers of time and space, as it reaches the limits of language? In the novel Tolk (My Interpreter, Gyldendal 2024) by Korean-Danish writer Lee Langvad, silences and ellipses spell out an aesthetics of displacement. Adopted from South Korea as a child, the narrator in this hybrid text travels from Copenhagen to Seoul for family meals, with an interpreter who also happens to be her girlfriend. In short scenes of intimate encounters and conversations, the narrator, members of her Korean family, and the interpreter all appear as familiar strangers to each other in different ways. Strangeness and queerness infuse the text in more than one way – the narration is punctured with elisions which indicate the passage of time during translation. In Tolk,thediasporic condition is written as much in the blank spaces as it is in words. Queer diasporic everydayness makes itself felt as a temporal exercise in patience and endurance, existential drama and mundane logistics always in close proximity. Langvad’s minimalist language holds stark emotions, history, and politics, while also being surprisingly comical and absurd.

Lee Langvad will host a workshop based on his/her unique poetic and conceptual approach to language, diaspora, adoption, and queerness. Participants will have the opportunity to familiarize themselves with elements of Langvad’s writing through formal experiments such as questionnaires, lists and repetitions. They will be able share their work with each other and receive feedback. In the evening, Langvad will read from Tolk, in Danish and English, and afterwards discuss with cultural researcher Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen the uses of experimental form against the demand for autobiographical literature, writing polyvocally, the many languages of secrecy, and the various forms of coming out that they require.
More about the event here.

Thursday, January 29, 2-4pm at DOR 24, room 1.308

“Queer Writing from the South Korean Diaspora”

Lee Langvad is a writer and translator who lives in Copenhagen. His/her latest book TOLK (My Interpreter) is a novel for which he received Montana’s Literature Prize.