It is about one o’clock on Monday in Seoul, and a tall, poised woman walks into a busy cafe. Dressed in a black jacket and a matching grey skirt, she says hello in German-accented Korean. She has huge, curious eyes.

Not many would think of this Korean-born Austrian author as a foreigner on busy Seoul streets. She looks like a cultured, professional Seoulite, whom one would expect to run into in galleries or museums. But Korea isn’t the only country in which she is easily regarded as a local.

“In Greenland, people thought I was Greenlandic because of the way I looked,” Anna Kim tells The Korea Herald, laughing. “And it helped me through while doing my research there.”

Having written highly-regarded books on colonial politics in Greenland and conflicts in Kosovo, the award-winning author is hard to miss in Austria’s literary scene.

“I am one of very few writers who are of Asian descent in Austria,” she says. “And I think I am the only Korean one. Many would very often ask me what I consider myself as ― Austrian or Korean. I think I am a good mixture of both.”

Born in Daejeon in 1977, the author’s family moved to Braunschweig, Germany when she was two years old. The family moved to Vienna, Austria, in 1984, and has made it their second permanent home ever since. 

Kim grew up in the city of music and monumental buildings, while her father worked as a fine art professor and her mother a philosophy lecturer.

“I grew up with nothing else but literature and art,” she says.

Initially wishing to become a theater director, Kim studied philosophy and theater studies at University of Vienna.

“Growing up in Vienna was very nice and I always had many friends,” she says. “It was only when I went to university I realized I was different. Suddenly people started talking to me in English thinking I was a tourist (in the city I grew up). They would offer me German language courses.”

It was also during her university years where Kim met many refugees from Kosovo. Kim, who was often furious about the way she was regarded simply by her appearance, eventually drew into the world of non-German speaking people and their lives.

Though Kim is a fiction writer, her past life has been very much like that of a freelance journalist. She’s been to Greenland, Kosovo, and even stayed in the U.K. for two years, interviewing the locals while writing about them. Kim has never been to a journalism school. Yet it seems like she learned the most important skills as an interviewer in her philosophy classes.

“You learn how to formulate questions when you study philosophy. You learn to question everything,” she says. “And you eventually learn to distinguish the right questions and the wrong questions. Sometimes questions are much more important than answers.”

Her famous second novel, titled “Frozen Time” in English, is based on real-life characters whom Kim interviewed during her stay in the war-torn country. “Almost everything that’s written in the book is based on facts,” she says.

Telling a story of a man whose wife went missing during the Yugoslav war, the novel thoroughly explores the meaning of loss and the difficult attempts to come to terms with one’s past. The book’s English translation was published in 2010.

“I was only 28 when I wrote the book,” she says. “The U.N. was very cooperative (with my research). They’d given me the whole disclosure of everything.

“Once I saw what I thought were little white stones, but they were actually bones of people’s toes. I heard many horrific stories.”

Her first novel, “The Trace of Pictures,” which deals with a father-daughter relationship, is largely based on her own real-life experience. “It’s a very experimental piece of work,” she says. “It’s a mixture of prose and poetry. German is a great language to write with because it’s very flexible. You can easily invent your own words with it.”

“The Trace of Pictures” is the only work of Kim where she’s used her personal history in the narrative. Yet her experience as a Korean-born woman living in Austria is inevitably reflected in her books, though they deal with lives of foreigners. Her essay, “Invading the Private” deals with the colonial history of Greenland, and its aboriginal people whose sense of identity have been severely damaged as they are forced to be either Danish or Greenlandic, especially by Denmark’s mono-language policies.

Her upcoming novel is also about the people in Greenland.

“On one night in 2008, a total of 16 young people all tried to commit a suicide in east Greenland,” Kim says. “But they had no connection with each other. I was inspired to write the novel by this real-life case.”

Unlike the book about Kosovo, however, she had to use a lot of imagination and fictional accounts for this one, as not many would talk about the particular 2008 case.

“I think it’s a myth that one has one identity only,” Kim, who never considered herself a “hundred percent” Austrian, says.

“Every person has many layers of being. It’s very important. You should never be forced to choose one (out of many).”

Kim, who had a reading session of her book, “Frozen Time” at Goethe-Institut Seoul on Thursday, will lecture about language assimilation policies in Europe in Busan on Nov. 3.

For more information about Kim and her books, visit www.annakim.at.

By Claire Lee (dyc@heraldcorp.com)