Irish Writer Danielle McLaughlin Connects Korean Students, Jeju History and the Human Value of Literature
Irish author Danielle McLaughlin led a creative writing workshop at Korea University during an embassy-backed visit that also took her to Jeju, where Han Kang’s novel had deepened her interest in the island’s history.
Irish writer Danielle McLaughlin has brought a message of practice, empathy and human connection to Korean students during a literary exchange visit that linked a Seoul classroom with the historical memory of Jeju Island.
The Cork-based author visited Korea through an initiative organized by the Irish Embassy and led a creative writing workshop at Korea University on Monday. McLaughlin, known for the short-story collection Dinosaurs on Other Planets and the novel The Art of Falling, encouraged students not to treat authorship as an innate gift reserved for a select few. Writing, she told them, is something that can be learned.
Her advice was grounded in practical habits: read widely, write regularly, find a writing group and accept that an early draft does not need to be good. The approach offered students a view of literary work as a craft developed through repetition, revision and exchange rather than inspiration alone. McLaughlin’s own career includes recognition from the Windham-Campbell Prizes and the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award.
The visit also carried an unexpected Korean literary connection. When the invitation arrived, McLaughlin was reading Nobel laureate Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, a novel that confronts the legacy of the Jeju April 3 massacre. The book made her trip feel especially meaningful and led her to visit Jeju, extending the exchange beyond a university workshop into an encounter with the island and its history. She has expressed interest in writing nonfiction about Jeju in the future, although she has not decided what form such a project might take.
McLaughlin also addressed the place of literature at a time when generative artificial intelligence can rapidly produce polished prose. Her emphasis was not on competing with machines for speed, but on preserving the connection between one human consciousness and another. For her, that relationship remains central to why stories matter.
That outlook also shapes the emotional responsibility she brings to fiction. McLaughlin said she does not want to leave readers brutalized or trapped in despair, even when a story enters difficult territory. Instead, she hopes readers can move forward feeling that the world remains worth engaging with.
The Seoul workshop and Jeju visit together highlighted how international literary exchange can operate on several levels at once: teaching craft, introducing readers to another country’s writers and creating new attention to histories carried through fiction.