Contemporary Writers

Chapter 1 opened with the 2024 Nobel Prize. This chapter looks at the writers around it: the novelists and story-writers whose books reached English readers in the last twenty years, what the sources say about their prizes and translators, and how often those sources contradict each other on small facts.

Five Writers at a Glance

Shin Kyung-sook

The article says she debuted in 1985 with the novella Winter's Fable, and that Please Look After Mom (2009) is her best-known book, a million-copy bestseller. She won the Man Asian Literary Prize for it, and the article calls her the first woman and the first South Korean to win. The year conflicts within the page: the lead and awards list say 2012, the career section says 2011. Chi-Young Kim translated the book into English (2011). The article also lists I'll Be Right There (2010) and gives The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness as the English title of a different book, A Lone Room. It reports that in 2015 the Huffington Post Korea alleged she had plagiarised a passage from a short story by Yukio Mishima in her book Legend; the article says she apologised and her publisher withdrew a collection of her short stories. That is a press report as the article gives it, and I add no detail.

Kim Young-ha

The article calls him "one of the most prominent figures in contemporary Korean literature", with recurring themes of urban alienation, identity and modern capitalism. His debut novel was I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (1996). Your Republic Is Calling You (2006) is described as a crime-fiction-style novel about a North Korean spy and his family in Seoul, and won the Manhae Literary Award (2007). Black Flower (2003), a historical novel about Korean migrant workers in Mexico, won the Dong-in Literary Award (2004). The English Diary of a Murderer is a 2019 collection; the Korean original of the title story is the novel A Murderer's Guide to Memorization (2013), adapted as the 2017 film Memoir of a Murderer. The article names Krys Lee as translator of the collection and names no translator for most other English editions. Its awards list includes the Yi Sang Literary Award (2012) and several earlier prizes.

The article is inconsistent on small points: its translations section says Brother Has Returned won the Yi Sang Award in 2004, while its awards list gives that year's prize as the Lee San Award; the film adaptation of Your Republic is tagged "in progress" with a "when?" marker; and one awards entry is unclear.

Han Kang

Chapter 1 gave her dates, the 2016 International Booker (The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith; the first Korean-language novel to win; the prize was shared by author and translator) and the 2024 Nobel Prize for "intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life". Chapter 8's Gwangju Uprising article lists Human Acts (2016) among books about May 1980. The Han Kang article names Deborah Smith for The Vegetarian, Human Acts and The White Book, Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won for Greek Lessons, and Emily Yae Won and Paige Aniyah Morris for We Do Not Part. I read no new material on her for this chapter.

Bora Chung

The article says Chung Bora is a South Korean writer and translator born in 1976, who studied at Yale, took a doctorate in Slavic literature at Indiana University Bloomington and has taught at Yonsei University. Her short-story collection Cursed Bunny was "shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize", translated by Anton Hur (Algonquin, 2022), who has also translated her other works. The article says the stories "borrow from different genres, including magical realism, horror and science fiction" and does not call her a purely horror writer. Its bibliography is marked "incomplete".

Cho Nam-joo: Kim Ji-young, Born 1982

The article says the novel follows a young woman who begins impersonating other women she knows and is taken for psychiatric help; it then traces her life through son preference in her family, workplace discrimination, marriage, pressure to have a child and stay-at-home motherhood, ending with depression, with a psychiatrist's narration closing the story. The article's own plot section is flagged as containing excessive detail, so this is simplified. It says the book "has sold more than 1 million copies as of 27 November 2018", the first Korean novel to do so since Please Look After Mom in 2009. A 2018 gift of the book to President Moon Jae-in boosted sales. In 2020 it was longlisted for the US National Book Award for Translated Literature and the French Emile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature. The author said she meant it to "make this into a public debate", and the article says it became part of feminist movements in South Korea. It records online backlash against a member of a K-pop group who mentioned reading it. A 2019 film starred Jung Yu-mi and Gong Yoo. The article names no translator, so I name none.

Exercises

Next chapter: Capstone: Reading Korean Literature as a Conversation.