Jikim Publishing

Tell us something about yourself. 

She has never regarded herself as a good writer, yet somehow writing has come to be her bread and butter. She earned a doctorate from one of the colleges of University of London and has since been teaching media theory and popular culture at several UK universities.

 

Tell us more about your practice.

Independent publishing company based in London, UK which is the first enterprise in the UK that publishes a series of guidebooks of “South Korean Culture”. 

 

Tell us something about the product you have chosen for the market.

“Bumping into BTS” is designed with an interest in three cultural symbols: K-Pop, BTS, and BTS's global fandom ARMY (Adorable Representative MC for Youth). However, what we have chosen to write about here is not the symbols in themselves, but the everyday activities surrounding them.

All three authors in this book read cultural studies in their 20s, yet none of them offer here any grandiose theories, or try to subject these symbols to detailed analysis. Instead, what is offered is a collection of private stories and experiences, taken respectively from an editor who happened to fall in love with BTS; a part-time lecturer who happened to teach British students about K-Pop and BTS; and a Korean TV producer who fell into this area of interest purely because she used to work with BTS a long time ago.

If 2020 was a food...

kimchi :)

 

Editor's note:

In addition to Bumping Into BTS, Ji Kim of Jikim Publishing has also curated a small selection of Korean-language children's fiction for the winter market. These books were adapted from the hit TV series on Netflix/tvn It's Ok Not To Be Ok

Ji Kim recently spent time teaching Korean language at university level. Her experience led to her choice of these children's books. They are a great way for learners to read Hangul in an engaging way. The themes of childhood anxieties are central to the TV series.The topics are something adult language learners can engage in with depth and yet benefit from gaining confidence in reading the simple sentences. There's also the added benefit of these books having been narrated in the series, making them great to read along.