When Irish writer Danielle McLaughlin received an invitation to visit Korea, she was deep into Nobel laureaute author Han Kang’s “We Do Not Part” (2021), a novel whose reckoning with the Jeju April 3 massacre had unsettled and moved her. The timing felt like an invitation within an invitation. “The minute I was invited, I knew I wanted to go,” she said during an interview with The Korea Times after leading a creating writing workshop at Korea University on Monday. The Cork-based author, known for the award-winning short-story collection “Dinosaurs on Other Planets” (2015) and the novel “The Art of Falling,” (2021) visited Seoul as part of the Irish Embassy’s inititive to bring contemporary Irish writers to Korea. The embassy began its exchange program in 2024 with the help of Dublin City Libraries, the public-library network run by Dublin City Council. At Korea University on Monday, more than 50 students — many encountering McLaughlin’s work for the first time — packed into a classroom for a two-hour creative writing workshop. The room’s enthusiasm was striking.