Shin Kyung-sook

Shin Kyung-sook was born on January 12, 1963, in a farming village near Jeongeup, in South Korea's North Jeolla Province, the fourth of six children and the eldest daughter. At sixteen she left home for Seoul, where an older brother lived, and supported herself on an electronics assembly line while attending a night school set up for factory workers who could not afford daytime study. She went on to the Seoul Institute of the Arts, graduating with a degree in creative writing, and made her literary debut in 1985 with the novella Winter Fable, which won the Munye Joongang New Author Prize. Her 1993 collection Where the Harmonium Once Stood established her as the defining new voice of her generation, praised for a lyrical, interior style that turned Korean fiction away from the political social realism of the preceding decades, and won her the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award. Further honors followed, including the Yi Sang Literary Award, the Manhae Literature Prize, the Dong-in Literary Award, and the Oh Yeongsu Literature Prize. Her 2008 novel Please Look After Mom, about a mother who vanishes in a Seoul subway station, sold more than a million copies in South Korea within a year and was eventually published in nineteen countries; Chi-young Kim's 2011 English translation made Shin the first woman, and the first Korean writer, to win the Man Asian Literary Prize. She has since published I'll Be Right There (2010), drawn from her own student years during the pro-democracy movement, and I Went to See My Father (2021), among other novels. In 2015, she apologized after passages in her earlier story Legend were shown to closely echo a Korean translation of Yukio Mishima's Patriotism, and her publisher withdrew the collection containing it. She continues to write and teach, dividing her time between Seoul and New York.

Before she was a writer she was a diarist. In the village near Jeongeup where she grew up, a railway line cut past the house, and animals and sometimes people were struck and killed on the tracks. She began writing down what she saw in a private notebook, before she had any thought of an audience.