2015 Sejong Benefit Dinner

Sunday, October 18, 2015 at 5pm
Crystal Ballroom at Drury Lane

Please call 312.497.3007 or email sejong@sejongculturalsociety.org for questions.

$125 per person (student discount $75 per person)
RSVP requested by October 8, 2015

If you cannot attend the benefit, please consider making a donation.

Including a silent auction and music performances by winners of the Sejong Music Competition.

Euny Hong’s most recent book, The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture (August 2014, Picador) received rave reviews. The Guardian UK described the book as “fabulously snarky”; the New York Times called it “Incisive and humorous…an excellent case study of calculated entrepreneurial moxie.” Bloomberg Businessweek wrote, “An insightful book…[Hong’s] brief chapter on Korea’s han against Japan is both the best and most concise explanation I’ve read of the two countries’ complicated and ancient feud.” She has made numerous TV and radio appearances, on such programmes as Ronan Farrow Daily, Bloomberg TV, BBC2’s “Picture This,” France 24’s “Business Interview,” and others.

Her first novel, Kept: A Comedy of Sex and Manners, the story of a group of young New York aristocrats unable to accept their obselescence, was published by Simon & Schuster US, in August 2006, to great acclaim. Previously she was the weekly US television columnist at the Financial Times Weekend, US Edition. She has hundreds of published articles to her credit, which have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The International Herald Tribune, The New Republic, The Boston Globe, and The Forward, among others. She is also the recipient of a Fulbright Young Journalists Grant. She spent six years in Paris as a journalist for France 24, an international news network.

She spent her childhood between the US and Seoul, Korea, and has also lived in Frankfurt and Berlin, Germany. She graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in Philosophy. While at Yale, she co-founded Rumpus, a very juvenile campus humour magazine that remains in continuous operation. She holds a Higher Certificate from the Wine and Spirits Education Trust in the UK but seriously doubts that being a sommelier would be a good fallback option. She is fluent in English, French, German, and Korean.

Two video links to Euny Hong speaking about the The Birth of Korean Cool:

https://youtu.be/FWEujjnHCmE  (Published on Oct 18, 2014, video length 12 min, The Business Interview - What's the link between a booming economy and pop culture? Markus Karlsson asks Euny Hong, author of "The Birth of Korean Cool").

https://youtu.be/SxHv2gT539o    (Video length: 1 hour 8 min, video posted by The Korea Society, October 15, 2014 - Author Euny Hong discusses, with The Wall Street Journal Online’s columnist Jeffrey Yang, her first nonfiction book, The Birth of Korean Cool,)

Crystal Ballroom
Drury Lane
100 Drury Lane
Oakbrook Terrace, IL 60181