Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group acquires for the imprints Alfred A. Knopf, Pantheon, and Schocken. Alfred A. Knopf, founded in 1915, is a premier publisher in the United States of literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, memoir, biography, cookbooks, etc. Pantheon publishes innovative fiction, narrative nonfiction, and graphic novels. I have worked for the past five years with Knopf’s poetry editor, Deborah Garrison, and the editor of Alice Munro and Lawrence Wright, Ann Close, helping to publish a range of books from David Grossman’s Booker Prize-winning A Horse Walks into a Bar to Judith Chernaik’s Biography of Robert Schumann, to Amit Majmudar’s Translation of the BhagavadGita, Godsong. My acquisitions include two novels, Yaniv Iczkovits’s The Slaughterman’s Daughter, set in 19th-century Russia and translated from the Hebrew and Bud Smith’s <Teenagers>, set on America’s highways, and two nonfiction works in the fields of history and science.
My goal in participating is to connect with agents promoting Korean literature and with the authors and publishers they represent, with the aim of bringing more Korean fiction to the Knopf and Pantheon imprints. I’d love to gain a greater understanding of the market in Korea, how books are acquired, published, distributed, and consumed by readers, so as to better grasp which books will translate well to the American market. More so than these concerns, however, I want to discover great work by talented Korean authors and find a way to share that work with American readers.
