South Korean writer and translator Ha-yun Jung’s essay “Besieged,” published in World Literature Today’s November 2025 issue, has been selected for The Best American Essays 2026, edited by M. Gessen and forthcoming October 20. The essay traces the unsettling return of history when martial law is declared in South Korea in December 2024, prompting Jung to revisit her teenage years under military rule and the wounds carried by her family into adulthood. Moving between personal memory and national history, “Besieged” considers what it means for the past to suddenly feel present again, collapsing decades of political change into one disorienting moment.

Jung is a writer whose literary practice moves fluidly between original writing and translation. Her work has appeared in Harvard Review, The New York Times, Translation Review, and other publications, while her translation credits include fiction by Oh Jung-hee, Kim Hoon, and Shin Kyung-sook, as well as Wallace Stevens’s poetry collection Harmonium, the first of Stevens’s books to be translated into Korean. Her translation of Choi Eun-mi’s short story “Unnae” also appeared in Shenandoah’s seventy-fifth anniversary issue. Jung teaches literary translation at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, continuing a practice that places Korean literature in conversation with readers and writers beyond its original language.

The selection of “Besieged” places Jung’s deeply personal reckoning with political memory within one of the year’s notable American essay anthologies. Published first by World Literature Today, the essay now moves into a wider literary readership through The Best American Essays 2026. For Jung, the recognition also underscores the reach of literary nonfiction to preserve moments that official histories can flatten: the private fears, inherited wounds, and sudden recognition through which history becomes intimate.

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