Bora Chung

Chung Bora (born 1976) is a South Korean writer and translator. Her collection of short stories, Cursed Bunny, was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize. Her parents were dentists. She completed graduate studies in Russian and East European area studies at Yale University, then went on to gain a PhD in Slavic literature from Indiana University Bloomington. She taught the Russian language, literature, and science fiction studies at Yonsei University.

Career Chung has written three novels and three collections of short stories. She is also a recipient of second prizes at the Digital Literature Awards (2008) and Gwacheon Science Center SF Awards (2014).

In January 2024, another short story collection of hers, Your Utopia, came out in English translation, as did the novella Grocery List from Hanuman Books in June 2024, both were translated by Anton Hur. Hur announced that Chung's third novel, Red Sword, will be published in English translation in 2025. Her fourth novel, Midnight Timetable, will also be translated into English by Hur, published in 2026.

Red Sword and Midnight Timetable were both finalists for the 2026 Locus Award for Best Translated Novel.

Chung translates contemporary prose from Russian and Polish into Korean. She has spoken out about the need for the inclusion of the themes of minority groups in modern science fiction. During the Gaza war, Chung condemned Israel's action and expressed her support for Palestine; she also signed a letter calling for boycott of Israel.

Chung has criticised artificial intelligence, stating "From what I read, human beings really don't understand what we created, and artificial intelligence and deep learning, machine learning, all these things are structured so that the machine would accumulate experience and data and information and analyze them and draw conclusions more like human beings do. So that means our prejudices, our misconceptions, our own hate and misunderstanding and discrimination is part of the data human beings created. So technology is not impartial. Information is not neutral. And that is backfiring. And that will backfire. But probably engineers don't agree with me. So yeah, I'm afraid of machines."