2024 National Book Award for Translation winner and Writing alum Lin King '22 has sold her debut novel, WEEB, to Henry Holt books. The novel follows a racially ambiguous young American protagonist who moves to Tokyo in hopes of meeting her favorite anime character’s voice actor and explores desire, obsession, and racial passing as the protagonist is deformed by their own obsessive desires.
In an Instagram post announcing the debut, King wrote, “My family and friends know that I’ve had quite a grueling journey getting here. 6 years: 4 spent on a manuscript that I rewrote from scratch twice only to fail at selling to a publisher, and 2 years writing this completely different book that I hope you will read.”
King has translated numerous book-length translations from Mandarin to English with Greywolf Press and Strangers Press among others. Her translation of Taiwan Travelogue by Yand Suang-Zi was the winner of the National Book Award in Translated Literature 2024. Her fiction has been published in Joyland, One Story, and Boston Review where she was a semifinalist for the Aura Estrada Short Story Contest. She has also received the PEN/Robert J Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. King is based between Taiwan and New York.
