Jinwoo Park, "Oxford Soju Club" (Dundurn Press, 2025)

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Anywhere.

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Hilton Honors, baby.

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When you want points that can take you anywhere, anytime, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Book your spring break now.

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It's not a battle.

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It is an honor to share.

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It is our larger honor.

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**SPEAKER_3** (1:29)
Welcome to the New Books Network.

**Nicholas Gordon** (1:33)
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books Podcast and partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast, we interview fiction and non-fiction authors working in, around, and about the Asia Pacific region.
Doha, a North Korean spy master is found stabbed in an alley in Oxford. Doha tells his mentee, another North Korean spy named Yohan, to go to the Oxford Soju Club, a restaurant in the British University town. That starts a dance between three different Koreans, Yohan, Jihoon, the South Korean owner of the Soju Club, and Yunah, a Korean American recruited to weed out Yonah.
Oxford Soju Club, the debut novel from Jinwoo Park, uses this spy thriller setting to explore ideas of history, migration, and identity. Jinwoo is a Korean-Canadian writer based in Montreal. He completed a master's degree in Creative Writing University of Oxford, and currently works as a marketer in the tech industry. So Jinwoo, thank you so much for coming on the show today to talk about your novel, Oxford Soju Club. Let's set the scene for this book. What's the event that sets the story in motion?

**Jinwoo Park** (2:43)
Well, first of all, thank you for having me. Glad to be here, and let's set the scene. The first very scene that really set the book in motion was when I was in Oxford, and I was still in my honeymoon phase of being in a creative writing program in such an ornate and historical city. Honestly, it was just like a thought.
I was looking at those cobblestone streets, just walking by and thinking, a car chase would be quite amusing here.
That got me the idea for a spy game story between a North and South Korean. Then later down the line, if I could add another second moment that really set this whole thing in motion, was when I was going through a pretty bad time in my other day job career, which is in tech marketing. I was trying to get my writing mojo back after three years of not writing at all. Then I went back to that story because I needed something fun to get myself back into the flow of writing. And yeah, that's how it all got started.

**Nicholas Gordon** (4:17)
So you kind of have three characters in your book, the Northerner, Southerner, the American. They're all Korean, at least in some way. But why did you want to divide your protagonist into these three buckets?

**Jinwoo Park** (4:34)
Well, I think it's because all those three characters are versions of me, I guess. There are all these different ways of being Korean that I've experienced as a member of the Korean diaspora abroad. And at first, obviously, I wanted this to be between a South and North Korean and their perspectives in a foreign land. But I also realized that I want to add a third character, the sort of the, I guess, hold on, I'm just trying to like think through this.