Han Sorya

Han Sorya (한설야, born Han Pyŏngdo; 3 August 1900 – 6 April 1976) was a Korean writer, literary administrator and politician who spent much of his career in North Korea.

Regarded as one of the most important fiction writers in North Korean history, Han also served as head of the Korean Writers' Union and Ministry of Education.

During his career, Han survived a number of purges that were caused by factional strife within the Workers' Party of North Korea, to become a member of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea.

Han, motivated by personal grievances against his rival writers, sometimes acted as the force behind the purges within the cultural establishment as well.

Han was born on 3 August 1900 in Hamhung, in the north of Korea, Empire of Japan.

His father was a county magistrate.

He graduated from middle school in 1919 and attended Nippon University in Tokyo from 1921 to 1924, studying sociology.

He emigrated to Manchuria in 1925 but returned to Seoul in the south in 1927.

The organization had been founded in 1925 during his emigration in Manchuria, and after the liberation it would have been the only left-leaning Korean literary organization.

For this reason, Kim Il Sung would promote writers like Han who had belonged to it and exaggerated their achievements.

His subsequent fame would only be due to his association with the (KAPF), which he joined in Seoul in 1927.

During the early 1930s, Han did briefly associate himself with leftist ideas, but later, during the Pacific War, he became a pro-Japanese writer.

He also joined pro-Japanese writers' organizations.

After the war, he reinvented his image abruptly.

Besides the Japanese, he also distanced himself from the Domestic faction of the Workers' Party, though some scholars like explicitly include him in the faction.

Since the 1930s, Han had already had bad personal relations with these writers originally hailing from the south of Korea.

The struggle for dominance in the North Korean literary bureaucracy made them worse.

In retaliation Han, together with other writers including Yi Kiyŏng, founded the Korean Proletarian Literature Alliance (MR: ).

For Han's purposes his fellow writer Yi Kiyŏng, though respected, was not particularly interested in political matters and thus posed no threat to Han's own aspirations.

In 1944, he returned to his native Hamhung.

After the liberation of Korea, he settled in Pyongyang.

Han was one of the most prominent fiction writers in the history of North Korean literature.

During his career, Han earned the official title of "the greatest writer of modern Korean literature", which he shared with Yi Kiyŏng, and was called a "living classic".

A writers' association called the (MR: ) was founded in 1945 immediately after the liberation by Kim and others.

Han, however, disagreed with this approach, accusing it of forgetting class questions.

The two organizations became merged to form (MR: ) in late 1945.

Disapproving of this, Han moved to the north of the country, and was one of the first writers to do so.

Soon after starting his career in North Korea, Han had become one of the earliest and most enthusiastic admirers of Kim Il Sung, with whom he had met in February 1946.

Han acted in his writing as a "curator of the personality cult" of Kim Il-sung and was, in effect, the official hagiographer of Kim.

Indeed, the cult's beginnings can be traced as far back as 1946 when Han coined the appellation "our Sun" to describe Kim.

From this position, he played an important role in opposing the Soviet Koreans faction during the late 1950s.

After the liberation of Korea, writers were faced with the task of establishing a national literature.

Some, like, sought to gather a wide range of both moderate and progressive writers to write "democratic national literature".

Han's career was at its height from 1955 to 1957.

Han, along with Kim Tu-bong, shaped North Korea's cultural policies.

Before the division and independence of Korea from Japan, Han was an insignificant author.

Han himself was purged in 1962.

In his works, Han offered some of the earliest known contributions to the cult of personality of Kim Il-sung.

His influence is felt in North Korea even today, though his name has been forgotten from official histories.

Han's best-known work, the anti-American novella Jackals, however, has been invoked in the 2000s.