In This Memoir, Prison Is A Place — And A State Of Mind
The Prisoner, Hwang Sok-yong's expansive memoir — incisively translated by Anton Hur and Sora Kim-Russell — vividly captures a South Korean writer's literal and metaphorical imprisonment. Even the cover's ascetic design poignantly evokes the ruptures in Hwang's life and work — caused by war, ideology, geography, and language — rendering the author's disembodied profile in gray against cragged zones of black and white.
Hwang, a former political prisoner and pro-democracy intellectual, maintains that every Korean, North or South, is a refugee due to historical and economic circumstances, and has for decades pushed for peaceful, enacted by South Korea when the two countries were formally separated in 1948, has been used by the South to prosecute anyone deemed to "compromise the security of the State.")
