Stephen Epstein is the Director of the Asian Studies Programme at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. He has published widely on contemporary Korean society and literature and has also translated or co-translated numerous works of Korean and Indonesian fiction, including Contradictions, by Yang Gwi-ja (Cornell East Asia Series, 2005), Who Ate Up All the Shinga?, by Park Wan-suh, (Columbia University Press, 2009) and The Long Road by Kim In-suk (MerwinAsia, forthcoming 2010). He is currently working on a book entitled Korea and its Neighbours: Popular Media and National Identity in the Twenty-First Century.