Kim In-suk

Kim Insuk
Kim at the Seoul Book Fair, 2011
Born	1963 (age 53–54)
Occupation	Writer
Language	Korean
Nationality	South Korean
Citizenship	South Korean

Kim Insuk (Hangul: 김인숙) is a South Korean writer.

Kim Insuk was born in 1963 and is an author from the Korean 386 generation (writers born in the 1960s, went attended university in the 1980s, and were entered their 30s in the 1990s when the term was coined). She, along with Shin Kyung-sook and Gong Ji-young, is one of the prominent new wave of female writers from that group. Kim began her writing career early, making her literary debut when she had just entered University, at the age of 20 (Korean age in 1983, when she won Chosun Ilbo Literary Contest). She has won all three of Korea’s major literary awards, the Yi Sang Literary Award, Dong-in Literary Award, and Daesan, and she has had more than 30 books published. She has also lived in China in this decade; and in Spring 2011 was living in Dalian with her daughter.

Unusually, Kim’s work focuses extensively on the experience of Korean expatriates. In fact, her book The Long Road (which won the Hankook Ilbo Literary Prize the same year it was published) is the only piece of “expat” Korean fiction that has been translated into English. That book is among her fiction that draws the time she spent living in Australia in the 1990s. In 2003 Kim won the Yi Sang Literary award for her work Ocean and Butterfly (Bada-wa nabi) and in 2010 she won the Dong-in Literary Award for Bye, Elena (Annyeong, ellena). Her latest work in Korean, To Be Insane (Michil su issgessni, i salm-e) had its publication delayed at Kim’s request. The story featured a massively destructive earthquake and tsunami, and Kim believed that it would have been inappropriate to release this work just after the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan.