Angela Hur

Angela Hur
Hangul	허미영
Revised Romanization	Heo Mi-yeong
McCune–Reischauer	Hŏ Miyŏng

Angela Mi-Young Hur (born Los Angeles, California) is a Korean American writer. Since 2010, she has lived in Stockholm, Sweden, where she works as an editor for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. She is currently working on a second novel.

Early life and education

Raised in Gardena, California, Hur graduated from Phillips Academy, an Andover, Massachusetts boarding school, in 1998. She remained in Massachusetts to continue her education after high school, enrolling at Harvard University, where she majored in English. While an undergraduate, she became involved in student theater, but realized that she was more drawn to writing than acting during a project with renowned playwrights Ping Chong and Michael Rohd, then in residence at Harvard as Peter Ivers Visiting Artists. In lieu of a senior thesis, she wrote a novel about a woman having her mother's diaries translated from Korean to English, and the love triangle among her, her mother, and the translator. Her major literary influences included Henry James, Aimee Bender, Haruki Murakami, Marguerite Duras, and Alfred Hitchcock. She received her bachelor's degree in 2002. Later, she entered the Master of Fine Arts program at Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, where she was a recipient of the university's Sparks Fellowship; she graduated in 2005.

Career

After receiving her MFA, Hur spent one year writing what would be her first published novel, The Queens of K-Town, which was published in August 2007 by MacAdam/Cage. Anne Wyman gave The Queens of K-Town a largely favourable review in the San Francisco Chronicle, while Adelle Waldman, writing for the Village Voice, praised Hur's writing as "evocative without being obtrusive" but criticised the novel as a whole for its self-indulgence and lack of coherence. Others compared The Queens of K-Town to Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides. Hur hopes to have The Queens of K-Town published in Korean as well.

Hur lived in Long Beach, California when The Queens of K-Town was published. She later moved to Seoul, South Korea to take up a position as a lecturer of English at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.