Hwang Sok-yong

Hwang Sok-yong (born January 4, 1943) is a South Korean novelist.

Hwang was born in Xinjing (today Changchun), Manchukuo, during the period of Japanese rule.

His family returned to Korea after liberation in 1945.

He later obtained a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Dongguk University(동국대학교).

Hwang has been an avid reader of a wide range of literature and he wanted to become a writer since childhood.

"In the fourth year of primary school, I wrote something for 'creative writing class'. It was chosen to be entered into a national contest, and won the top prize. It was the story of someone returning home after having fled south during the Korean war; the title was 'Homecoming Day'. Having come home, the protagonist finds that the whole village has been left in ruins, in the wake of the war's devastation. My story described the afternoon he spends sorting through the plates and household goods in his home. That was the first time I received praise from a wider community, and I decided that when I grew up, instead of a fireman or a soldier I was going to be a 'writer', though I wasn't completely sure what this meant. I thought that writing was something you did with the buttocks; because you have to spend a long time sitting at your desk."

In 1964 he was jailed for political reasons and met labor activists.

Upon his release he worked at a cigarette factory and at several construction sites around the country.

In 1966~1969 he was part of the Republic of Korea Marine Corps during the Vietnam War, reluctantly fighting for the American cause that he saw as an attack on a liberation struggle:

"What difference was there between my father's generation, drafted into the Japanese army or made to service Imperial Japan's pan-Asian ambitions, and my own, unloaded into Vietnam by the Americans in order to establish a 'Pax Americana' zone in the Far East during the ColdWar?"

In Vietnam he was responsible for "clean-up," erasing the proof of civilian massacres and burying the dead.

A gruesome experience in which he was constantly surrounded by corpses that were gnawed by rats and abuzz with flies.

Based on these experiences he wrote the short story "The Pagoda" in 1970, which won the daily newspaper Chosun Ilbo's new year prize, and embarked on an adult literary career.

His first novel Mr. Han's Chronicle, the story of a family separated by the Korean War, was published in 1970.

The novel is still topical today after Kim Dae-jung's visit to North Korea and meeting with Kim Jong-il led to reunion programs for separated families, and talk of reunification.

Hwang Sok-yong published a collection of stories, On the Road to Sampo in 1974, and became a household name with his epic, Jang Gilsan, which was serialized in a daily newspaper over a period of ten years (1974?84).

Using the parable of a bandit from olden times ("parables are the only way to foil the censors") to describe the contemporary dictatorship, Chang Kil-san was a huge success in North as well as South Korea.

It sold an estimated million copies, and remains a bestseller in Korea fiction today.

Hwang Sok-yong also wrote for the theatre, and several members of a company were killed while performing one of his plays during the 1980 Kwangju uprising.

During this time Hwang Sok-yong went from being a politically committed writer revered by students and intellectuals, to participating directly in the struggle.

As he says:

"I fought Park Chung-hee's dictatorship. I worked in the factories and farms of Cholla, and I took part in the movements of the masses throughout the country . . . in 1980, I took part in the Kwangju uprising. I improvised plays, wrote pamphlets and songs, coordinated a group of writers against the dictatorship, and started a clandestine radio station called 'The voice of free Kwangju."

The 1985 appearance of Lee Jae-eui's book Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of Age (English translation: Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of Age, 1999) brought new trouble: Hwang Sok-yong originally agreed to take credit as the author in order to help market the book, and both Hwang as the assumed author and the publisher were arrested and sent to prison.

Hwang Sok-yong's substantial and award-winning novel based on his bitter experience of the Vietnam War, The Shadow of Arms was published in 1985.

In 1989 Hwang Sok-yong traveled to Pyongyang in North Korea, via Tokyo and Beijing, as a representative of the nascent democratic movement:

In 1993 he returned to Seoul because "a writer needs to live in the country of his mother tongue" and was promptly sentenced to seven years in prison for breach of national security.

While in prison, he conducted eighteen hunger strikes against restrictions such as the banning of pens, and inadequate nutrition.

It would be translated into English in 1994 and French in 2003.

"At the time I received a seven year prison sentence for violating the 'National Security Law', and although Amnesty International and International PEN campaigned for prisoners' writing rights, which was also actively supported by the UN Human Rights Commission, I ultimately failed to obtain those rights. In 1998 Kim Dae-jung was elected as president and effected a shift in government, so I was released after only five years thanks to his special pardon. My 'realist narrative' was a way beyond the division which 'I' creates, and towards the universality of the world."

Rather than return to South Korea he went into voluntary exile in New York, lecturing at Long Island University.

He also spent time in Germany, which he found transformational.

Organizations around the world, including PEN America and Amnesty, rallied for his release and the author was finally pardoned in 1998 as part of a group amnesty by the then newly elected president Kim Dae-jung.

When asked whether the regime that had freed him, recognized his work and even sent him on an official visit to North part of a policy of opening up and promoting dialogue was a democracy, he replied:

Hwang Sok-yong published his next novel, The Old Garden, in 2000.

Mr. Han's Chronicle was translated into French by Zulma in 2002.

The Guest, a novel about a massacre in North Korea wrongly attributed to the Americans that had in fact been carried out by Christian Koreans, was published in 2002.

It would be translated into French in 2004 and Seven Stories brought out the English-language edition to critical acclaim in 2005.

It was published in German in Fall 2005 by DTV, French by Zulma.

The English-language edition, called The Old Garden, was published in September 2009 by Seven Stories Press, and was published subsequently in England by Picador Asia under the title The Ancient Garden.

The early chapters of the book are currently being serialized online.