Hwang Sok-yong
| Hwang Sok-yong | |
|---|---|
| Born | Hwang Soo-yong January 4, 1943 |
| Pen name | Hwang Sok-yong |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Language | Korean |
| Nationality | South Korean |
| Citizenship | South Korean |
| Website | |
| blog |
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| Korean name | |
| Hangul | 황석영 |
|---|---|
| Hanja | 黃晳暎 |
| Revised Romanization | Hwang Seok-yeong |
| McCune–Reischauer | Hwang Sŏgyŏng |
Hwang Sok-yong (born January 4, 1943) is a South Korean novelist.
Hwang was born in Hsinking (today Changchun), Manchukuo, during the period of Japanese rule. His family returned to Korea after liberation in 1945. He later obtained a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Dongguk University(동국대학교).
Hwang has been an avid reader of a wide range of literature and he wanted to become a writer since childhood.
In the fourth year of primary school, I wrote something for ‘creative writing class'. It was chosen to be entered into a national contest, and won the top prize. It was the story of someone returning home after having fled south during the Korean war; the title was 'Homecoming Day'. Having come home, the protagonist finds that the whole village has been left in ruins, in the wake of the war's devastation. My story described the afternoon he spends sorting through the plates and household goods in his home. That was the first time I received praise from a wider community, and I decided that when I grew up, instead of a fireman or a soldier I was going to be a ‘writer’, though I wasn’t completely sure what this meant. I thought that writing was something you did with the buttocks; because you have to spend a long time sitting at your desk.
In 1964 he was jailed for political reasons and met labor activists. Upon his release he worked at a cigarette factory and at several construction sites around the country.
In 1966~1969 he was part of the Republic of Korea Marine Corps during the Vietnam War, reluctantly fighting for the American cause that he saw as an attack on a liberation struggle:
What difference was there between my father’s generation, drafted into the Japanese army or made to service Imperial Japan’s pan-Asian ambitions, and my own, unloaded into Vietnam by the Americans in order to establish a “Pax Americana” zone in the Far East during the ColdWar?
In Vietnam he was responsible for “clean-up,” erasing the proof of civilian massacres and burying the dead. A gruesome experience in which he was constantly surrounded by corpses that were gnawed by rats and abuzz with flies. Based on these experiences he wrote the short story “The Pagoda” in 1970, which won the daily newspaper Chosun Ilbo’s new year prize, and embarked on an adult literary career.
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