Shin Kyung-sook, also written Kyung-sook Shin, is a South Korean writer born in 1963 and associated with the so-called 386 Generation, a group of female authors who emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. She became the first South Korean and the first woman to win the Man Asian Literary Prize, in 2012, with the novel Please Look After Mom, a book that brought her work to readers far beyond her country.
She grew up in a village near Jeongeup, in North Jeolla Province, the fourth of six children. Her parents were poor farmers who could not afford secondary school, and at sixteen she moved to Seoul to live with her older brother. There she worked at an electronics plant while attending night school, and later graduated from the Seoul Institute of the Arts.
Her literary debut came in 1985 with the novella Winter's Fable, which earned her the Munye Joongang prize for new writers. Over the following decades she published novels, short stories and a few works of non-fiction, and collected a long list of honours, among them the Yi Sang and Dong-in literary awards. Her fiction tends to turn on everyday life, memory and family ties, as in Deep Sorrow or A Lone Room.
Her best-known work abroad is Please Look After Mom, sold to publishers in nineteen countries and translated into English by Chi-Young Kim in 2011. Her legacy lies chiefly in bringing contemporary Korean fiction to international readers and in standing as a prominent voice among the women writers of her generation.
Key works
- Winter's Fable (1990): a novella that marked her debut and won the Munye Joongang prize.
- Deep Sorrow (1994): a novel about grief and personal memory.
- A Lone Room (1995): a novel whose French translation was honoured in France in 2009.
- Please Look After Mom (2009): her internationally best-known novel, translated into many languages.
Curiosities
Plagiarism controversy
In 2015, The Huffington Post Korea reported that a passage in her book Legend resembled one from Yukio Mishima's short story Patriotism. She apologised, and her publisher withdrew a collection of her short stories.
A prize for lesser-known books
In 2009, the French translation of A Lone Room was one of the winners of the Prix de l'Inaperçu, which honours excellent literary works that have not yet reached a wide readership.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.