Oh Young-su
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Oh Yong-su
Occupation Novelist
Nationality South Korea
Period 1914-1979
This is a Korean name; the family name is 오.

Oh Yong-su (born 1914) (Hangul: 오영수) is a South Korean writer.
Contents
[show]
[edit] Life

Korean author Oh Yong-su was born in Onyang (Ulsan County, South Kyongsang Province) on February 11, 1914 [1] and in his early life attended a sodang, a traditional Confucian school. He graduated from elementary school in Onyang in 1928 and four years later traveled to Japan to attend an intensive program at Niniwa Middle school from which he graduated in 1935. He then attended Nippon University to study Engineering, but acquired beri-beri and was forced to withdraw and go back to Korea. Oh returned to Japan in 1937, but quickly left again to avoid ‘voluntary’ impressment into the Japanese Imperial Army. He returned and finally graduated from the Tokyo National Arts Academy [2]. Upon his return to Korea, he quickly traveled to Manchuria, a common pathway for Koreans seeking to escape the Japanese colonial rule. Sometime thereafter he returned to Korea and married in 1942. His parents died the following years, mother in 1943 and father in 1944. In 1945 he moved to Kijang Township (Tongnae County) where he taught at the Kyongnam Girls High School in nearby Busan. In 1952 he changed jobs, moving to the Pusan Middle School [3]. In 1954 Oh moved to Seoul to help prepare the first edition of the Modern Literature Journal. [4] He quickly became the editor of the journal where he worked until an ulcer forced him to stop in 1966. After his resignation from Modern Literature, Oh became very ill and oppressed by the tax burden of his house, moved from Seoul to Uidong.[5] After surgery removed 2/3 of his stomach Oh became housebound, eventually moved back to his South Gyongsang and died in his home in Ulsan in 1979.[6]

[edit] Work

Oh’s first publications occurred on his first return trip to Korea (1935-7) during which time his children’s poetry was published in the Chosun Times (Choson ilbo) and East Asian Times (Donga ilbo). In 1949 he published his first fictional work, Nami and the Taffyman, which appeared in the New World Magazine. This was quickly followed with Wild Grapes which won an award from the Seoul News (Seoul Shinmun).[7] In 1952 Oh published Uncle in Soldiers’ Literary Digest (Sabyong Mungo) and The Woman from Hwasan in Literary Arts (Munye). From 1954 to 1966, as editor of the Modern Literature journal[8], Oh contributed almost 30 stories, including Spring’s Awakening, Migratory Birds, and Girl from an Island. Oh also wrote for other periodicals including the work A Death at the Mill. Inn 1955 Oh received the Prize of the Korean Literature Association and the Asian Liberty Literature Prize in 1959. (376) In 1968 Oh issued an omnibus of his work, the five volumes of which contained 90 stories.[9] Three years before his death, Oh published his sixth work of anthology, Dusk. In 1978 he released his last anthology of stories and received an award from the Academy of Arts as well as a governmental Cultural Medal of Merit.
[edit] Critical Reception

Oh’s works were brief in length and laconic in dialogue.[10] Oh’s critical reputation has declined in recent years as, like Hwang Sun-won, Oh has been called outdated and escapist and lacking in a national or historical consciousness. In fact, Oh is rarely overtly political and seldom judges larger political and economic systems, still, his works are laced with on the ground snapshots of what these systems conclude in. [11]
[edit] Works in English

Good People: Korean Stories (Writing in Asia)
Loess Valley and Other Korean Short Stories (Modern Korean Short Story Series No 1)

[edit] Works in Korean (Partial)
[edit] References

^ p. 376
^ p. 376
^ Good People, Heinemann Publishing, 1986 p.xiv
^ Good People, Heinemann Publishing, 1986 p.xvi
^ Good People, Heinemann Publishing, 1986 p.xxi
^ Good People, Heinemann Publishing, 1986 p.xxii
^ Good People, Heinemann Publishing, 1986 p.xiii
^ Good People, Heinemann Publishing, 1986 p.xvi
^ Good People, Heinemann Publishing, 1986 p.xxi
^ Good People, Heinemann Publishing, 1986 p.xv
^ http://www.ktlit.com/korean-literature/review-the-good-people-by-oh-yong-su

[edit] External links

Review of Good People with links to individual stories online.

Given that the movie The Crucible (Titled Silenced in English) is about to come out in the States, I thought it was time to do a little cleanup on Gong Ji-young on the Wikipedia. So I added some info, cleaned up some errors, and updated information on the movie (as well as updating info on the Wiki pages for the book and the movie, and linking them all together). The graphic below shows what the page looked like two days ago:

Now it looks like this, and has (as noted above) appropriate links to the book and new movie:

And if you really want to see something funny, here’s what it looked like in June of 2010, before I did the first patch ups (NOTE: It did NOT have the pink “revision” tag):

Changing the world 1-3% at a time!

After accidentally mis-spelling his name, it is here, and looks like this:

Cho Hae-il

Cho Hae-il (born Haeryong) (Hangul: 조) is a South Korean writer.

Life

Cho Hae-il was born April 18th, 1941 ^[1] in Manchuria and was originally given the name Haeryong, which means Sea Dragon in Chinese. ^[2]. After the liberation of Korea his family returned to Seoul and five years later the Korean war began. During the war his family joined the stream of refuges who retreated to Busan, only returning so Seoul in 1954 at the cessation of hostilities^[3]. Cho entered Posong Middle School where, by his own admission, he had “the lowest scholastic achievements” ^[4]. At this school he entered the creative writing club. In 1960 he lived through the Student Revolution of April 19th, about which he said made him very proud for the achievements of others and very shamed for his own failure to participate^[5]. In 1961 he entered Kyunghee University, where he majored in English literature and met Hwang Sunwon, one of the greatest Korea senior writers in Korea. Graduating in 1966, he served his mandatory military service in various roles. Upon his discharge from the service, he begins writing. When his writing career began to wind down in the late 80s, Cho moves to teaching creative writing at Kyunghee University. He married in 1972 and has one son^[6].

Work

Cho made his literary debut with The Man Who Dies Every Day, which won first prize in the JoongAng Ilbo spring literary contest in 1970. Over the next few years Cho was quite prolific, publishing at least twelve short stories and the novella America between his first work and 1974. In 1976 Cho published The Winter Woman, which goes on to achieve massive success and makes Cho a popular writer, though he believes his fame to be undeserved^[7]. From 1974 to 1986, Cho writes steadily, both short stories and newspaper serials. Cho’s work often focuses on the weaknesses of individuals and societies. His America (in English) tells the story of a man and local society deformed by the presence of US troops in Korea.^[8] His short story The Iron Mask tells the story of a couple attacked, and the wife beaten, while The Psychologists explores the dynamics of violence in the confines of a bus^[9].

Works in English

America

Works in Korean

America (collection)
The Children of God (novella)
The Winter Woman (serialized in the JoongAng Ilbo then published)
The Man on the Roof (serialized in the Seoul Sinmun)
Rainday (collection)
The Country that Never Was (serialized in the JoongAng Ilbo then published)
X (serialized in the Donga Ilbo then published)
The Seven Stories of Im Kockchong

References

External links

Oh Jung-hee

Oh Jung-Hee (born 1947) (Hangul: 오) is a South Korean writer.

Life

Oh Jung-hee (Also romanized as O chonghui, O Chong-hui) was born in Seoul on November 9th, 1947. She attended the Sorabol Art College from which she received her B.A. in Creative Writing in 1968 ^[1]. Oh made her initial literary impact while in her final year of college as she was awarded the Chungang Ilbo annual award for aspiring writers. This work was even more remarkable as Oh began to write it while she was still in High School ^[2]. The story was “The Toyshop Woman,” a dark story about a high-school girl who is emotionally abandoned by her parents and whose disabled brother dies. This sets her on a path of madness which is paved by kleptomania and sexual obsession. This was a groundbreaking work^[3]. As Oh matured as a writer her work became increasingly non-imagistic and centered on family life as something like a trap for women^[4]. From 1990 on, Hui has published only sporadically, including one work of children’s fiction, Song-I, It’s Morning Outside the Door^[5].

Work

Oh has captured both the Yi Sang Literary Award and the Dongin Literary Award, Korea’s most prestigious prizes for short fiction, and her works have been translated into multiple foreign languages in Southeast Asia, Latin America and Europe^[6]

Oh’s work in English is varied. Her most recently published work is Spirit on the Wind. Spirit on the Wind alternates between the first-person narration of a husband, Se-jung, and the third-person narration of Ŭn-su, his wife. As the story begins, Se-jung ponders the latest in a series of his wife’s disappearances, the first of which occurred a mere six months after their marriage. As Ŭn-su continues to wander off all of those around her, including her mother, become increasingly incredulous and troubled by Ŭn-su’s behavior, which they see as an abandonment of her family. Ŭn-su herself is unhappy. She vaguely identifies the root of her wanderlust in the fact that she was an adopted child, but this never quite seems reason enough and she is, “tired of wandering, tired of feeling that the home in which she was living was temporary” ^[7]. Ŭn-su’s continued betrayal of the family bond strains everyone, yet she is unable to control the winds that drive her. Worse, she cannot seem to summon up the memories that might explain it, “Everything before that [her 5th birthday] seemed hidden behind a dark curtain: none of it had surfaced in her mind” (55-56). The consistent and obvious metaphor in Spirit on the Wind is the wind itself, which is explicitly tied to memory: “Whenever she heard the wind, Ŭn-su would nod as if some long forgotten memory has just then surfaced“ (50); and she is left with only, “her anxious quest for identity to be stirred up and given wing by the slightest breath of wind” (56). Ŭn-su’s marriage collapses. Ŭn-su is finally reunited with her memories, but by the time that comes, it is too late for a happy ending. Ŭn-su remains in search of that wind that can blow her clean. This work is an example of Oh’s later work in which women “perceive, with fear and trembling, the abyss of emptiness that is the origin of and the truth of human existence. ^[8].”

Chinatown by Oh Jung Hee contains three stories, the eponymous Chinatown, Wayfarer, and The Release. These stories have been translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton. Chinatown
 takes place, in Incheon’s (Once Chemulpo) famous Chinatown, a tourist destination in the modern era, but a slum at the time. Though the story is placed in the post-war era, and though it featurse unavoidable fallout from the war, it is much more a coming of age tale than a tale about effects of the war.

The heart of the story is of a nine year old girl who comes to a greater awareness of sex and death. As the narrative moves forward, the girl observes the relationship, family, and eventual death of a prostitute named Maggie, as well as the sad death of her own grandmother. As backdrop to these events, Oh gives us the seventh pregnancy of the girl’s mother. Oh blends these stories into a collage representing the circle of life, and then drops a final graceful note in a one sentence paragraph with which the narrator concludes her story: “My first menstrual flow had begun.”

Wayfarer is the sad story of a woman who has been abandoned (in a cruel replay of childhood trauma) by her family and society. After killing a burglar, and spending two years in a mental hospital, Hye-Ja returns to a world that wants no part of her. Family and friends have reframed the killing of the burglar as the murder of a man who may or may not have been somehow related to Hye-Ja. In other words, Hye-Ja is suspected of having killed her lover. Oh cleverly weaves metaphors of blankness, coats of snow, and inaccessibility to paint a picture of Hye-Ja’s isolation, an isolation so profound that Hye-Ja is spurned even by beggars. At the end, drunk and staggering, Hye-Ja walks down a road that she knows will never end. The Release portrays a mother and daughter united by a shared but separate tragedy. Both women have lost their husbands at an early age, and in a culture that is historically inimical to widows, this is a social kiss of death. The pain they share is exacerbated by the mother’s intimate knowledge of what her daughter must undergo.

The Bronze Mirror is in at least two collections, including the seminal Land of Exile. In The Bronze Mirror an elderly couple live with memory of their son, killed twenty years earlier in the April 1960 student revolution.

The Bird is a thoroughly depressing story of two siblings in the economic slump of the mid 1990s. A 12 year old girl and her brother are abandoned by their abusive father (who has already driven away the mother). The children are semi-adopted by an eclectic set of neighbors but soon enter an apparent downward spiral.

Works in English

Chinatown, Wayfarer, The Release (in Chinatown)
Spirit on the Wind (in Red Room: Stories of Contemporary Korean Trauma)
Bronze Mirror (in Land of Exile)
The Bird
Evening Game, Chinatown, Words of Farewell (in Words of Farewell),

Works in Korean (Partial)

Fire River (불의 강)
Childhood Garden (유년의 뚤)
Spirit of the Wind (바람의 넋)

References

External links

Review of “The Bird”
Review of Spirit On the Wind in larger review of Red Room
Review of Chinatown

With a bit of this and that, it is now this lovely page:

As far as I can tell, Park has had nothing translated into English, but if someone was willing to put the page up?

I’m willing to make it wiki-quality.^^

But I’m also including a screenshot, because this entry begins a new era (LOL!) for the Wikipedia Project – and that is the one in which I have pictures to put up for the entries. The Wikipedia is very strict about copyright infringement, and the easiest way to trump that if to take your own pictures (of public folks). So.. here it is:

This is a Korean name; the family name is “김”.

Kim In-suk (Hangul: 김인숙) is a South Korean writer.

 

Life

Kim In-Suk is an author from the Korean 386 generation (writers born in the 1960s, went attended university in the 1980s, and were entered their 30s in the 1990s when the term was coined).^[1] She, along with Shin Kyung-sook and Gong Ji-young, is one of the prominent new wave of female writers from that group. Kim In-sook began her writing career early, making her literary debut when she had just entered University, at the age of 20 (Korean age). She has won all three of Korea’s major literary awards, the Yi Sang, Dong-in, and Daesan, and she has had more than 30 books published. ^[2] She has also lived in China in this decade; and in Spring 2011 was living in Dalian with her daughter. ^[3]

Work

Unusually, Kim’s work focuses extensively on the experience of Korean expatriates. In fact, her book The Long Road is the only piece of “expat” Korean fiction that has been translated into English. ^[4] That book is among her fiction that draws the time she spent living in Australia in the 1990s. In 2003 Kim won the Yi Sang Literary award for her work Ocean and Butterfly <바다와 나비> and in 2010 she won the Dong-in award for Goodbye Elena <안녕, 엘레나>. Her latest work in Korean, To Be Insane <미칠 수 있겠니, 이 삶에> had its publication delayed at Kim’s request. ^[5] The story featured a massively destructive earthquake and tsunami, and Kim believed that it would have been inappropriate to release this work just after the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan.

Works in English

The Long Road

Works in Korean (Partial)

To Be Insane (미칠 수 있겠니, 이 삶에)
Ocean and Butterfly〈바다와 나비〉
Goodbye Elena <안녕, 엘레나>

References

The subject was the Seoul International Book Fair and always friendly  Ahn Juhghyun and I talked for about 15 minutes about the Book Fair itself (which I idiotically called a “conference” about half the time) and things having to do with the KTLIT site..

Here is the sound-file of that discussion:

book fair110620_5

Lee Seung-u (이승우) at ponderization

This is one of the authors who spoke at the Daesan Foundation Seoul Literature Forum two weeks ago. He now has a Wiki page, and it looks like this..

Lee Seung-u

Lee Seung-u(born 1959) (Hangul: 이) is a South Korean writer.

Life

Lee Seung-u was born in Jangheung, Jeollanam-do in 1959. ^[1] Lee Seung-u graduated from Seoul Theological University and studied at Yonsei University Graduate School of Theology.^[2] One of the outstanding writers to have emerged in South Korea after the political repression of the 1980s,^[3] he is today Professor of Korean Literature at Chosun University. ^[4] Lee’s literary career started with his novel A Portrait of Erysichton, which was triggered by his shock at the assassination attempt of Pope Paul II in 1981. This work received the New Writers Award from Korean Literature Monthly. ^[5] In 1993 Lee’s Two Sides of Life was awarded the 1st Daesan Literary Award ^[6] and he has also received he East West Literature Prize for I Will Live Long,^[7] he has also won the Contemporary Literature Award for Fiction and the Hwang Sun-won Literary Award.^[8]

Work

Lee has received high critical acclaim in Korea, but is more publicly popular in France than in Korea.^[9] In Portrait of Erysichton, In the Shadow of Thorny Bushes, and Two Sides of Life ), Lee Seung-u works on the notion of Christian redemption and how it intersects with human life, demonstrating how tension between heaven and earth are revealed in quotidian life. ^[10] Other works, including A Conjecture Regarding Labyrinth and To the Outside of the World face up to disillusionment pursuant to the corruption and devaluation of language. ^[11]

Works in English

The Reverse Side of Life

Works in Korean (Partial)

NOVELS
A Portrait of Erysichton
In the Shadow of Thorny Bushes
Warm Rain
Gold Mask
Two Sides of Life

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Mr. Koo Pyeongmok’s Cockroach
About Eclipse
To the Outside of the World
A Conjecture Regarding Labyrinth
Magnolia Park

Jo Kyung-ran (조경란)

It is here, and it looks a little bit like this (and it is just amazing how little English information is out there on Jo!):

Jo Kyung-ran (born 1969) (Hangul: 조경란) is a South Korean writer.

Life

Jo Kyung-ran was born in Seoul in 1969 ^[1] where she went on to study creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts ^[2], but did not decide to become a writer until she turned 28.^[3] Jo lived in Bonngcheon-dong for nearly 20 years in a small rooftop apartment which her father built for her.^[4] She made her literary debut in 1996 with the short story, French Optical which won the Donga-Ilbo Prize. ^[5] Internationally famous, she is a speaker in demand for conferences, having appeared at “Beyond Borders: Translating and Publishing Korean Literature in the U.S.” in New York in 2009 ^[6] and more recently at The Seoul International Forum for Literature 2001.^[7]

Work

Jo’s work is famous for taking trivial, mundane, and everyday occurrences and delicately describing them in subtle emotional tones. ^[8] Her work has won the Munhakdongne New Writer Award, the Today’s Young Artist Award, The Contemporary Literature Award (for the 2003 novella A Narrow Gate), and the Dong-in Literary Award. ^[9] and Her work has been translated into French, German, and English. ^[10]

Works in English

Tongue

Works in Korean (Partial)

French Optical
My Purple Sofa
Looking for the Elephant
The Ladle Story
I Bought a Balloon
Time for Breaking Bread
Tongue
Swordfish