France Falls for "The Bird That Drinks Tears"... Lee Youngdo Wins Cultissime Novel Award

Awarded for the First French Volume;
Shortlisted for Major Local Genre Fiction Prizes

Translated into 17 Languages Across Over 30 Countries;
English Edition Also Receives High Praise

Lee Youngdo's acclaimed fantasy novel The Bird That Drinks Tears has won France's "Prix du livre Cultissime" (Cultissime Novel Award).

Lee Youngdo’s The Bird That Drinks Tears (French Edition) and Author Photo. Gold Crown Publishing

On the 28th, Golden Branch, the publisher, announced that the first volume of the French edition of The Bird That Drinks Tears was selected as the winner of the 2026 Cultissime Novel Award. The Cultissime Novel Award is presented every autumn at the “Cultissime Festival,” an international literature and comic festival held in Angers, France, and recognizes works of fiction that have been loved over time and have the potential to become enduring classics.

Academy members and publishing house recommendations are first considered by a panel of expert judges who select the final nominees. The winner is then decided through a voting process, with the general public and the expert group each accounting for 50%. According to the publisher, this year’s finalists also included “Correspondent” by Virginia Evans, which topped The New York Times Best Sellers list in 2026 and won the PEN/Hemingway Award, along with new works by John Boyne and Adélaïde de Clermont-Tonnerre.

In his acceptance remarks, Lee Youngdo expressed, “I sincerely thank you for bestowing such a precious award. A writer who expresses solely through words, without video or BGM, may seem a bit behind the glittering times—a dedicated communicator who can easily become lonely as a result.” He added, “I gain strength from those who seek out such storytellers.”

Although only the first of four volumes has been published in France so far, the local literary community continues to take interest. The Bird That Drinks Tears has also been shortlisted for major French genre fiction awards, such as the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire and the Prix Imaginales. The publisher stated that the novel has reached the final round of another European literary prize set to be awarded in early 2027, with the official announcement expected at the end of this year.

The Bird That Drinks Tears is currently being translated and published in 17 languages across more than 30 countries outside Korea. In Germany, all four volumes have already been published in full, and, buoyed by reader response, another signature work by Lee Youngdo, Dragon Raja, has also been signed for translation, with the first volume set to release this November.

In June, the English edition translated by Anton Hur was released. Reviewing for genre literature magazine Locus, critic Abigail Nussbaum wrote that the novel blends the familiar structure of epic fantasy with unique, unfamiliar details for Western readers, offering “a rich and endlessly surprising experience.”

First published in 2003, The Bird That Drinks Tears is a four-volume fantasy epic that creatively weaves Korean themes such as dokkaebi, ssireum (wrestling), and yutnori (a traditional board game) into its own original universe. The series has sold approximately 1 million copies in Korea. Translations continue to be published across Europe, including in Russia, the Czech Republic, Italy, Türkiye, Croatia, and Spain.

Recently, a Ukrainian reader reading The Bird That Drinks Tears during the ongoing war garnered attention by sending a handwritten letter in Korean to the author. The reader wrote, “The world you created became a sanctuary where I could breathe, if only for a moment, away from the harsh reality,” and sent the letter along with a photo of the Ukrainian edition’s four volumes to the Korean publisher.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.