Cho Se-hui

Korean · 1942 to 2022

Cho Se-hui was born on 20 August 1942 in Gapyeong, Gyeonggi Province, in Japanese-occupied Korea. He studied Korean literature at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, and in 1965, the year he graduated, won the Kyunghyang Shinmun's New Year literary contest with a debut short story. He then published almost nothing for a decade. In 1975 he returned to fiction with 'The Möbius Strip,' the first of twelve linked stories he wrote for literary magazines over the next three years, following one displaced family through the demolitions and forced redevelopment reshaping Seoul under South Korea's industrial drive. Collected in 1978 as 'The Dwarf' ('Nanjangi-ga Ssoa-ollin Jageun Gong'), the novel's fractured, anachronistic structure and unadorned prose won it the Dong-in Literary Award in 1979 and made it one of the defining Korean novels of the postwar era, even as it drew censorship from the military government. Cho largely set fiction aside afterward. In 1980, he went to the mining town of Sabuk, in Gangwon Province, after police crushed a miners' uprising there; he returned in 1985 with a camera and months of documentary photographs, published as the photo-essay collection 'The Root of Silence.' A story collection, 'Time Travel,' had appeared in 1983. He kept turning up at the sites of the country's evictions and protests for the rest of his life. 'The Dwarf' meanwhile kept finding readers: it was the first Korean novel to reach 200 printings, appeared on the national college entrance exam, and by mid-2022 had gone through 320 printings and sold more than 1.48 million copies. An English translation by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton appeared in 2006. Cho died on 25 December 2022 at a hospital in Seoul, at eighty, following a coma brought on by COVID-19; he was survived by his wife, Choi Young-ae, and two sons.