A Country on the Cusp of Change
Hwang Sok-young has been writing politically engaged fiction about contemporary South Korean life for fifty years. Only now, on a rising tide of appreciation for all things Korean—including the international success of fellow writers like Hang Kang, Lee Min Jin, and Kim Sagwa and the filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho—is his work beginning to receive more attention from English-speaking audiences. Hwang’s recent novel At Dusk, originally published in 2015 and translated into English in 2018, was longlisted for both the 2019 International Booker Prize and 2020 PEN Translation Prize.
A member of the “April 19th Generation”—named after the 1960 student revolution protesting the military dictatorship that came to power in South Korea after the Korean War—Hwang has often found his creative life imperiled by his political stances. In the 1990s, he was imprisoned for his participation in a cultural exchange with North Korea. The last twenty years, however, have been prolific ones, and three of the novels from this period are now available in English from Scribe Publications, meticulously translated by Sora Kim-Russell.
and were written and published over a period of eight years, with other books coming out in between. And. Both creators grapple with gross economic inequality, but they diverge sharply in their representations of the relationship between the haves and the have-nots. Hwang has a tendency to conflate poverty with nobility, but instead of casting the wealthy as villains, he appears to pity them, too.
