• Authors

• Translators

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  Yang Gui-ja

  ウォンミドンの人々 (People of Wonmi-dong)

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  Ye Soyeon

  Ye Soyeon is the author of the short story collection Love and Flaws and the novel Sisters of the Cat and Desert. She has been awarded the Moonji Literary Award, Golden Dragon Book Awards, and the Lee Hyoseok Literary Award. Her short story “That Dog and the Revolution” won the Yi Sang Literary Award in 2025.

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  Yi Chong-Jun

  Yi Chong-Jun (1939–2008) produced seventeen novels, 155 short stories, and one play over the course of his career. His notable works include Your Paradise, Seopyeonje, and “The Wounded.” Nine of his works were cinematized, including Secret Sunshine, which was based on his story “The Abject.” He received the Dongin Literary Award, Yi Sang Literary Award, Lee San Literature Prize, and the Daesan Literary Award. He was also posthumously awarded the Geumgwan Order of Cultural Merit. His works have been translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese.

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  Yi In-seong

  Yi In-seong (born 1953) is a South Korean modern novelist.

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  Yi Kwang-Su

  Yi Kwang-su (1892–1950) was a Korean writer and independence and nationalist activist. His pen names were Chunwon and Goju. Yi is best known for his novel Mujeong (무정 The Heartless), sometimes described as the first Korean novel. 1. LifeYi Kwang-su was born Yi Bogyeong in 1892 in Jeongju. He was orphaned at age 10 and grew up with Donghak believers. In 1904, around the time of the Donghak Peasant Revolution, he moved to Seoul in order to avoid the authorities. In 1905 he went to Japan for his education. In 1909 he published his first story, written in Japanese, "Ai ka" (愛か Maybe Love), in Meiji Gakuin’s Shirogane gakuhō, his school newsletter. Upon returning to Korea in 1913, he taught at Osan School in Jeongju. He later moved back to Tokyo and became one of the leaders of the anti-colonial student movement. In 1919 he moved to Shanghai and served in the Korean Provisional Government and became president of The Independent, a newspaper in Shanghai. Yi returned to Korea in 1921 and founded the Alliance for Self-Improvement, established on principles of enlightenment and self-help. From 1923 to 1934 Yi pursued a career in journalism working for several newspapers, including two that survive today, the Dong-a Ilbo and the Chosun Ilbo. After the war, the Special Committee for the Investigation of Anti-nationalist Activities found Yi guilty of collaboration. In 1950 Yi was captured by the North Korean army and died in Manpo on October 25, most likely of tuberculosis.2. WritingYi was a fiction writer and essayist. His essays originally focused on the need for national consciousness. His fiction was among the first modern fiction in Korea and he is most famous for his novel The Heartless. The Heartless was a description of the crossroads at which Korea found itself, stranded between tradition and modernity and undergoing conflict between social realities and traditional ideals. His career can be split into thirds. The first period (that of The Heartless), from 1910-19 featured a strong attack on Korea's traditional society and the belief that Korea should adopt a more modern, "Western" worldview. From the early 1920s to the 1930s, Yi transformed into a dedicated nationalist and published a controversial essay, "Minjok gaejoron" (민족 개조론 On the Remaking of National Consciousness), which advocated a moral overhaul of Korea and blamed Koreans for being defeatist. The third period, from the 1930s on, coincided with Yi's conversion to Buddhism, and his work consequently became noticeably Buddhist in tone. This was also the period in which, as noted above, Yi became a Japanese collaborator. Yi's professional judgment could be as fickle as his politics. In one famous case he befriended then abandoned the fellow writer Kim Myeong-sun, allegedly because his own beliefs about modernism had shifted. Yi has also been considered one of the pioneers of queer literature in Korea, publishing the short story "Ai ka" (愛か Maybe Love) in 1909, at the age of seventeen.

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  Yi Kyoung-Ja

  Yi Kyoung-Ja (b.1948) made her literary debut in 1973 when she won the Seoul Shinmun New Writer’s Contest with the short story “Confirmation.” Lee sensationalized contemporary society by addressing women’s issues in her short story collection Failure of the Half. Her writings contemplate woman as independent individuals. Her preeminent works are the short story collections Failure of the Half and Hunchback’s Love, along with the novels Suni and The Third House. She is a Han Moo-sook Literary Award recipient.

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  Yi Mun-yol

  Yi Mun-yol was born in 1948. He made his debut as a writer in 1977. Yi’s works were enriched by the classics of East Asia that he had naturally become familiar with during his childhood and the Western literature that he had voraciously devoured in his young adulthood. In The Son of Man, Yi questioned the relationship between man and god; in A Portrait of Youthful Days, he portrayed the struggle and anguish of his youth. The Golden Phoenix was an exploration of the ontological meaning of art using calligraphy, a traditional art form in Korea. Yi also has consistently published works that are critical to the nature of political power. Our Twisted Hero is an allegorical depiction of the mechanism of how political power operates. Homo Executants portrays the process through which political ideology suffocates humanity. Aside from these, his works include Hail to the Emperor, The Age of Heroes, Choice and Immortality. The recipient of Korea’s highest literary prizes, Yi has been published in over 20 countries including the U.S., France, Great Britain and Germany; over 60 titles of his translated works are available.

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  Yi Sang

  Yi Sang (1910-1937) is a well-known author of the Japanese occupation period. He was active in every genre, writing poetry, fiction, and essays. His poems and stories, in particular, exhibit the characteristics of modernism in the 1930s. In his poems, he showed us the desolate landscape of the modern human mind, and with the use of anti-realist techniques in works such as “Crow’s Eye View, Poem No.I,” he gave us a stark view of his subject matter: pure anxiety and horror. In his stories, as well, he deconstructed the formal conventions of fiction and laid bare the modern condition. For example, in the short story “Wings,” he used stream-of-consciousness to express the alienation of modern human beings, who are fragmented, commodified, and unable to function in their daily lives. All 80 or so of his works are compiled together in the collected works by Yi Sang.

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  Yi Won

  Yi Won debuted in the pages of Segye-ui Munhak in 1992. Her poetry collections include When They Ruled the Earth, A Thousand Moons Rising Over the River of Yahoo!, The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, The History of an Impossible Page, Let Love be Born, and I Am My Affectionate Zebra. She has received the 2005 Contemporary Poetics Prize, the 2002 Contemporary Poetry Award, and 2018 Hyeongpyeong Literary Award. She works as a professor of creative writing at Seoul Institute of the Arts.

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  Yi Yuksa

  Yi Won-rok (May 18, 1904 – January 16, 1944), better known by his pen name Yi Yuksa, was a Korean poet and independence activist.