Bae hadn’t considered becoming a writer while growing up in Korea; instead, she studied chemistry at university. During her 11‑month getaway in Berlin between 2001 and 2002, she began learning German a few months into her stay out of boredom. This unplanned path eventually led her to become a translator, translating texts from German into Korean. In an interview with The Guardian, she said she “enjoyed it because it meant I could read books that I was enchanted by, and then experience them as different books in my native language.”
Since 1993, Bae has published several short story collections and more than a dozen novels. For a decade, she divided her time between Korea and Germany. She wrote Untold Night and Day in Germany.
Her unique writing style has often been criticized as “un-Korean.” One review, which accused Bae of “doing violence to the Korean language” by referring to the phrase “a greater music” from her novel The Essayist’s Desk (2003), caught Smith’s attention. Smith was also drawn to the fact that Bae is both a translator and a writer, that she tends to favor the kinds of authors whose style she enjoys. One critic pointed out that The Essayist’s Desk reads as if it were written in German and then translated into Korean—a quality that may reflect a skill the novel’s Korean writer protagonist, living in Berlin, is attempting to master through her relationship with her German teacher, M. Bae thinks that her tendency to use lengthy sentences or repetition might have caused the criticism.