Hwang Sun-won

Who was Hwang Sun-won?

Hwang Sun-wŏn was a Korean short story writer, novelist, and poet. He was born while Korea was under Japanese colonial rule in Taedong, South Pyongan, in modern-day North Korea; however, following the division of Korea he lived in the South, becoming a professor at Kyunghee University.

Although he wrote many volumes of poetry and eight novels, Hwang achieved his greatest acclaim as the author of short fiction, which was regarded as the premiere literary genre through most of the twentieth century in Korea and Hwang was noted, particularly early in his career, for refusing to write in Japanese. Hwang is the author of some of the best-known stories in the modern Korean literary canon, including “Stars”, “Old Man Hwang”, “The Old Potter”, “Cloudburst”, “Cranes” and “Rain Shower”. Hwang began writing novels in the 1950s, his most successful being Trees on a Slope, which depicts the lives of three soldiers during the Korean War. Sunlight, Moonlight depicts the lives of members of the former untouchable class in urban Seoul. The Moving Castle depicts the complex and problematic synthesis of Western and indigenous cultures in rapidly modernizing Korea. It is also one of the few depictions in fiction of gender roles in Korean shamanism.