This Part is Silent - A Life Between Cultures: SJ Kim in conversation with Preti Taneja

Longlisted for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

‘SJ Kim’s... lyricism hides a razorblade: I haven’t read a more beautiful, more raging and anguished account of racism and female erasure. It’s a book about finding a toehold in a world that would rather you slipped and fell. It’s a book about survival and unbelonging. It is necessary reading.’ Neel Mukherjee

In this daring and moving memoir, Korean-born SJ Kim, who was raised in the American South, probes her experiences as a writer, scholar, and daughter to confront the silences she finds in the world. With curiosity and sensitivity, she writes letters to the institutions of the state and academia that simultaneously support and fail her. Interspersed with her intimate accounts of immigration experiences, and interrogations of rising anti-Black and anti-Asian racism, she considers the silences between generations―especially within the Asian diaspora in the West – as she finds her way back to her own family during the pandemic lockdown. Embracing the possibilities and impossibilities of language, Kim rejoices in the similes of Korean, her mother tongue, and draws inspiration from K-dramas and writers who sustain her, including Yusef Komunyakaa, Don Mee Choi, Toni Morrison, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

SJ Kim is the author of This Part Is Silent, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Her writing on racial, gendered, institutional and political violence has appeared in Wasafiri, Oxford American, and The Hanok Review among other publications. She resides in the UK and teaches creative writing at the University of Warwick.

Preti Taneja is Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at Newcastle University