Bright: Mui Poopoksakul in conversation with Saskia Vogel
The Bindery | 1727 Haight Street | San Francisco, CA
Mui Poopoksakul talks about her translation of Duanwad Pimwana’s Bright, the first-ever novel by a Thai woman to appear in English translation, with Saskia Vogel, moderated by Laura Goode.
“Bright will prove to be seminal for Thailand’s place in the literary world.” — Prabda Yoon, author of Moving Parts
When five-year-old Kampol is told by his father to sit in front of their run-down apartment building and await his return, the confused boy does as he’s told—he waits and waits and waits, until he realizes his father isn’t coming back anytime soon. Adopted by the community, Kampol is soon being raised by figures like Chong the shopkeeper, who rents out calls on his telephone and goes into debt extending his customers endless credit.
Dueling flea markets, a search for a ten-baht coin lost in the sands of a beach, pet crickets that get eaten for dinner, bouncy ball fads, and loneliness so merciless that it kills a boy’s appetite all combine into this first-ever novel by a Thai woman to appear in English translation. Duanwad Pimwana’s urban, at times gritty vignettes are balanced with a folk-tale-like feel and a charmingly wry sense of humor. Together, they combine into the off-beat, satisfying, and sometimes magical coming-of-age story of an unforgettable young boy and the timeless legends, traditions, and personalities that go into his formation.
“Duanwad Pimwana has a knack for finding the gap between who we are and who we’d like to be, and deftly inserting her scalpel there. Across the villages and cities of Thailand, her characters exist in a state of constant anxiety, unable to fit in but having nowhere else to go.” —Jeremy Tiang, author of State of Emergency
Mui Poopoksakul is a lawyer turned translator with a special interest in contemporary Thai literature. She is the translator of Prabda Yoon’s The Sad Part Was and Moving Parts, both from Tilted Axis Press. She is translating a novel and a story collection by Duanwad Pimwana, both forthcoming in 2019 from Two Lines Press and Feminist Press, respectively. A native of Bangkok who spent two decades in the U.S., she now lives in Berlin, Germany.
Saskia Vogel is the author of Permission, a novel on grief, desire, and coastal Los Angeles that was published in five languages and longlisted for the Believer Book Award. She is also the deputy editor the Erotic Review, a 30-year-old UK arts and lifestyle journal which relaunched in March 2024. Her writing focuses on desire, landscape, subculture, and care, and has been awarded the Berlin Senate Endowment for Non-German Literature. She can be read in Granta, The Paris Review, The White Review, The Offing, The Literary Hub, and more. A translator of over two dozen Swedish-language books, her work has won the Bernard Shaw Prize (Johanne Lykke Holm’s Strega), the CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction (Johannes Anyuru’s They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears), has been shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize (Jessica Schiefauer’s Girls Lost), as well as having been supported by grants from the Swedish Arts Council, the Swedish Authors’ Fund, and English PEN. She was Princeton University’s Translator in Residence in fall 2022, where she completed her translation of Linnea Axelsson’s Sámi epic Aednan. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she lives in Berlin.