Ko Un

Ko Un
Ko Un in Prague, Czech Republic, 23 May 2011
Korean name
Hangul	고은
Hanja	高銀
Revised Romanization	Go Eun
McCune–Reischauer	Ko Ǔn
Birth name
Hangul	고은태
Hanja	高銀泰
Revised Romanization	Go Eun-tae
McCune–Reischauer	Ko Ŭnt'ae

Ko Un (born 1 August 1933) is a South Korean poet whose works have been translated and published in more than fifteen countries. He had been imprisoned many times due to his role in the campaign for Korean democracy. Ko is routinely mentioned in Korea as one of the front runners for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Ko Un, born Ko Untae in 1933, was the first child of a peasant family living in Gunsan, North Jeolla Province. During a time when the national culture was being suppressed under the Japanese occupation, his grandfather taught him to read and write in Korean. He had also learned Chinese by the age of 8. When he was 12, he found by chance a book of poems by Han Ha-un, a nomadic Korean poet with leprosy, and was so impressed that he began writing himself.

Ko was still a teenager studying at Gunsan Middle School when the Korean War broke out in 1950. Many of his relatives and friends died and during it he was forced to work as a grave digger. He became so traumatized that he even poured acid into his ear to shut out the war’s noise, leaving him deaf in one ear. Then in 1952 Ko decided to become a Buddhist monk. After a decade of this life, during which he published his first collection of poems, Otherworld Sensibility (Pian Kamsang, 1960), and his first novel, Cherry Tree in Another World (Pain Aeng, 1961), he chose to return to the lay life. From 1963 to 1966 he lived on the remote island of Jeju-do, where he set up a charity school, and then moved back to Seoul. However, dependent on alcohol and not at peace, he attempted to poison himself in 1970.

Another chance discovery changed this negative state. Picking up a newspaper by chance from the floor of a bar, Ko read about Jeon Tae-il, a young textile-worker who set himself alight during a demonstration in support of workers' rights. Inspired by that selfless act, he lost all inclination to kill himself and turned to social activism. After the South Korean government attempted to curb democracy by putting forward the Yusin Constitution in late 1972, he became very active in the democracy movement and led efforts to improve the political situation. In 1974 he established the Association of Writers for Practical Freedom and that same year became a representative of the National Association for the Recovery of Democracy. In 1978 he became vice-chairman of the Korean Association of Human Rights, and vice-chairman of the Association of National Unity in 1979.