Elisa Shua Dusapin

Elisa Shua Dusapin (* 1992 in the department of Corrèze ) is a Swiss writer with Franco-Korean roots who lives in French- speaking Switzerland .

Life

Elisa Shua Dusapin, the daughter of a Frenchman , came to Switzerland as a child with her South Korean mother. She attended school in Porrentruy . She became Swiss at the age of 13. She started writing at high school . She then studied at the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel until she graduated in 2014 . In 2015 she worked as Maya Bösch's assistant and took part as an actress in a performance of Aeschylus' Protectors at the Geneva Festival de la Batie . She caused quite a stir with her first novel Hiver à Sokcho (2016). In 2016, the Canton of Jura appointed her brand ambassador for the Swiss Jura. In 2017 she spent six months as a scholarship holder in New York . In 2018 she published her second novel Les Billes du Pachinko .

plant

The novel Hiver à Sokcho (A Winter in Sokcho) is set in Sokcho , a rather dreary port and seaside resort on the South Korean east coast, near the border with North Korea, out of season . A Korean student works to earn money in a somewhat shabby hospitality business and gets to know a French man, a comic book author, who is looking for inspiration for a new comic here.

In the novel Les Billes du Pachinko (The Pachinko Balls), the narrator, Claire, visits her grandparents, Koreans, in Tokyo , who found refuge in Japan after the Korean War . She would like to make them go on a trip to their old homeland. The grandfather runs a pachinko game room in Tokyo . Just like the balls in the game, people are also guided by capricious forces that make their path seem unpredictable.

Awards

• 2016: Robert Walser Prize , Prix ​​Alpha and Prix ​​Régine Deforges for Hiver à Sokcho .
• 2019: Swiss Literature Prize for Les Billes du Pachinko

In German translation

• A winter in Sokcho , translated by Andreas Jandl. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-8412-1611-3 .

Web links

• Publications by and about Elisa Shua Dusapin in the Helveticat catalog of the Swiss National Library
• Literature by and about Elisa Shua Dusapin in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Elisa Shua Dusapin - “I need places where cultures mix”, Aargauer Zeitung, July 23, 2018
2. ↑ Elisa Shua Dusapin désignée ambassadrice du Jura, October 11, 2016 (French)
3. ↑ Comme dans un pachinko (…) la narratrice (…) et ses grands-parents (…) semblent poussés par des forces capricieuses, qui rendent le trajet des billes et des humains imprévisible.