Joheun (Jo) Lee (she/her) is a Korean-to-English literary translator and writer from South Korea. With roots in K-pop fandom, she is drawn to stories of desire, relationships, and identity, particularly by women and queer writers. Her translations include Lee Heejoo’s Holy Boy (Picador/HarperVia, 2026) and Amil’s The Forest Called You (Harvill Secker, 2026). Her translation of Lee Yuri’s short story “The End of the World” appeared in The Exchanges, and she holds multiple LTI Korea and KPIPA sample translation grants. She will begin her Master’s in Translation and Interpreting at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Fall 2026. Jo lives with her partner and four cats in Shanghai, China.
Cloud People by Lee Yuri (Munhakdongne, 2026) is a speculative novel set on a toxic pink cloud hovering above a wealthy Korean city. It is a vertical slum whose residents face forced demolition by a government-mandated “rainmaking ritual.” The novel is narrated by Haneul, a twenty-year-old woman whose name means “sky,” bitterly ironic for someone who cannot escape.
Haneul works at a BBQ restaurant, gnawing leftover rib bones in the back while customers leave food untouched. Her father works construction, her mother cleans three houses a day, her grandfather’s lungs are turning fibrous from the cloud itself, and her brother is still too young to work. The family holds together not out of love but necessity, each knowing they’ll need the same mercy when their own turn comes. As the ritual approaches, Haneul loses her family one by one: to escape, prison, illness, and a desperate act on a livestream. Lee Yuri draws on Korea’s tradition of romanticizing poverty—notably naming hilltop slums “moon neighborhoods” for their extreme elevation—and digs into the rot beneath. The pink cloud that looks like cotton candy turns out to be poison that destroys a family.