Sherri Shepherd and Jayci Lee Are Writing the K-Drama Novel You Didn’t Know You Needed

Here is a fact about the publishing industry that nobody bothers to state plainly: the best book deals tend to begin as something else entirely. Sherri Shepherd — comedian, actress, former co-host of The View, and apparently a woman of very specific taste in television — has announced her debut novel. It is called Life Is a K Drama, it is co-written with romance novelist Jayci Lee, and it will be published by MIRA, an imprint of HarperCollins, on 6 April 2027.

The premise: Keisha Thomson, a Harlem restaurateur with a passion for Korean dramas, falls for Han Seojun, a South Korean business executive. The publisher’s description calls it “a sweeping, cinematic love story that glows with humor, heart, and hard-won hope.” Which is, admittedly, the kind of copy that could describe almost any romance novel published in the last decade. What sets this one apart is the origin story behind it.

Shepherd and Lee co-host a podcast called Auntie & Ajumma, devoted to the art of the Korean drama and everything that comes with it. The novel grew from a year of conversations between the two women about what those stories do — the sweeping emotions, the slow-burn romance, the particular pleasure of watching two people fall in love through misunderstandings and longing and precisely timed rain. Shepherd described wanting to give readers “the background of Seoul, Korea, and you could get the Harlem soul.” That is a sentence that contains an entire aesthetic programme.

There is something quietly interesting happening in commercial fiction whenever a celebrity brings genuine literary instincts to the table rather than just a name. Lee, who is an established romance novelist, presumably brings the craft. Shepherd, who has spent decades making people laugh and feel things simultaneously, brings the cultural intelligence. The division of labour sounds sensible. Whether the result lives up to it is a question for April 2027.

For now, the announcement is a small reminder that the romance genre — still sometimes condescended to by the sort of people who have opinions about literary fiction — continues to attract serious creative energy from unexpected directions. K-dramas, after all, are essentially serialised novels written for television. It is about time someone noticed.