Taiwanese Fiction in Dialogue: The Art of Creation and Translation (Monday, November 3, 2025)
You are invited to join us for a conversation with Lin King, translator of Taiwan Travelogue, and Terao Tetsuya, author of Spent Bullets.
This dialogue event will:
- Explore the unique position and cultural significance of Taiwanese literature across different cultures
- Unpack the artistic challenges and decisions in Chinese-to-English literary translation
- Shed light on the creative and cross-cultural dialogue between authors and the translators of their works
Join us on Monday, November 3, 5:30-7:00pm in CDRS (MN 3230).
This event will be conducted in both Chinese and English, and is open to all UTM students and faculty, as well as anyone interested in the topic.
Special thanks to the Taipei Cultural Center in New York.
About the Speakers and Featured Works
Lin King is the English translator of Yang Shuangzi’s Taiwan Travelogue, published by Graywolf Press in November 2024. The translation was praised by The New York Times as “a delightful novel” and won the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Earlier this year, King and the author were invited by the Taipei Cultural Center in New York to give talks across the U.S., including at CUNY Hunter College, Chapman University, and several University of California campuses.
King is a writer and translator based in Taipei and New York. Her works of fiction have appeared in One Story, Boston Review, and Joyland, and she received the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers in 2018. Her translated works from Mandarin and Japanese to English include The Boy from Clearwater (Levine Querido), Cloud Labour (Strangers Press), and Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf Press). Her forthcoming translation, A Perfect Day to Put your Head in the Oven, will be published by Doubleday (UK) and Riverhead (US). King holds a Bachelor of Arts from Princeton University and a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University, where she has also taught undergraduate writing.
Tetsuya Terao (pen name) is the author of Spent Bullets, a collection of short stories set in Taiwan and Silicon Valley. Through interconnected stories, the book explores the psychological struggles and moral dilemmas of tech elites under pressure, questioning success and meaning in the modern world. The book has won the Taiwan Literature Awards’ Golden Book Award and New Bud Award. Its English translation will be published in October 2025, with a preview event at the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA). A film adaptation is currently in production.
Terao graduated from National Taiwan University with a degree in Computer Science and completed a Master’s degree in Software Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Before turning to writing full-time, he worked as an engineer at Google. His works include Spent Bullets and the essay collection Overfitting, both acclaimed for their sharp insight into technology, identity, and contemporary life.
