Juhea Kim Books in Order

If you want to read in order: Beasts of a Little Land → City of Night Birds → A Love Story from the End of the World
If you want sweeping historical fiction first: Beasts of a Little Land
If you want art, obsession, and ballet: City of Night Birds
If you prefer short, globe-spanning fiction: A Love Story from the End of the World

Juhea Kim was born in Incheon, South Korea, and moved to Portland, Oregon, when she was nine. That move left her with two languages and two homes to think from. She has said she learned to read and write very young in Korean, then had to learn it all over again in English after arriving in the United States. That early split between countries, languages, and ways of seeing still sits near the center of her work.

She started writing early, and never really stopped.

Before publication caught up with her, Kim spent years moving between art forms. She studied ballet and classical music, and later graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Art and Archaeology and a certificate in French. Those interests show up on the page. Her fiction pays close attention to color, movement, architecture, and the way a body carries memory, discipline, pain, or desire.

In her early career she worked in publishing in New York as an editorial assistant. In 2013, wanting more room for her own ideas, she founded Peaceful Dumpling, a magazine centered on sustainable living and ecological literature. That project ran for a decade and makes sense beside her books: even when Kim is writing about history, dance, or romance, she keeps circling back to the natural world and to the question of how people should live inside it.

Her break as a novelist came after a hard stretch. An agent encouraged her to stop leading with a story collection and try a novel instead. Kim has described going for a snowy run in Fort Tryon Park, seeing a hunter in her mind, then a tiger, then rushing home to write what became the opening of Beasts of a Little Land. The novel follows intertwined lives in occupied Korea, especially Jade and JungHo, across decades of love, violence, class struggle, and the fight for independence. Readers who respond to it tend to like the same mix Kim does: big historical forces, intimate human feeling, and characters who are never reduced to symbols.

Beasts of a Little Land introduced her to a wide audience, became a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and later won the 2024 Yasnaya Polyana Award.

She did not stay in one lane after that. City of Night Birds turns to the Russian ballet world and centers on Natalia Leonova, a once-famous ballerina trying to return to the stage after injury, addiction, and emotional wreckage. Kim has said the book grew out of her lifelong love of ballet and music, and you can feel that close-up knowledge in the novel's attention to rehearsal rooms, ambition, rivalry, and the strange mix of beauty and brutality that art can demand. It is less a backstage spectacle than a story about what devotion costs.

Her first story collection, A Love Story from the End of the World, widens the map again. The stories move across places and time periods, but they stay close to familiar Kim concerns: nature, human tenderness, moral choice, and the damage people do when they forget they belong to a living world. Alongside her fiction, she has published essays, journalism, and stories in places like Granta, The Guardian, Zyzzyva, Catapult, Joyland, Shenandoah, and Times Literary Supplement.

Kim is also deeply involved in environmental and animal advocacy. She has donated portions of book proceeds and prize money to conservation and aid work, and she has long spoken about veganism, low-waste living, and compassion as everyday practices, not branding. It fits the books. Her characters often face broken systems, but they are still asked to decide how to love, how to act, and what they owe other people and other creatures.

These days she is based in London and Portland, Oregon, and lives with rescue cats. The scale of her fiction can be large, but the things that power it are often small and stubborn: memory, beauty, grief, hunger, loyalty, and the hope that art might help people look at the world a little more carefully.