World Literature Today is thrilled to announce that Ha-yun Jung’s essay “Besieged,” from our November 2025 issue, has been selected for The Best American Essays 2026, edited by M. Gessen, forthcoming October 20.

In this essay, when martial law is declared in Korea in winter 2024, the writer is pushed to revisit her teenage years spent under military rule and confront the damage and despair encountered by her family as she approached the cusp of a precarious adulthood. Jung writes:

On December 3, 2024, when martial law is declared for the first time in forty-five years, it is aired live on national television and streamed real-time on YouTube. By now we have elected eight presidents by direct vote, have sent the culprits of the Gwangju massacre to jail, the democratic movement and its heroes and martyrs, honored and memorialized. Yet I hear—from the mouth of this elected civilian president—that, as of this minute, all political activity will be banned, all press and publications must undergo censorship, all violators of the decree will face arrest without warrant. The words instantly transport me back to the years spent under martial law and its aftermath, as if history has not taken place, as if I have awakened to find that it had all been a dream.

Jung’s writing has also appeared in the Harvard Review, New York Times, Translation Review, and other publications. Her translations include fiction by Oh Jung-hee, Kim Hoon, Shin Kyung-sook, and Wallace Stevens’s poetry collection Harmonium, the first of his books to be made available in Korean. Her translation of Choi Eun-mi’s short story “Unnae” was published in Shenandoah’s seventy-fifth anniversary issue this spring. She teaches literary translation at Ewha Womans University in Seoul. 

Congratulations, Ha-yun! We are proud to have been the first home for this outstanding essay.