Hwang Sok-Yong

Shortlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize International Booker-nominated virtuoso Hwang Sok-yong is back with another powerful story - an epic tale that threads together a century of Korean history. In contemporary Seoul, a laid-off worker stages a months-long sit-in atop a sixteen-storey factory chimney. During the long and lonely nights, he talks to his ancestors, chewing on the meaning...

Seoul. On the outskirts of South Korea's glittering metropolis is a place few people know about—a vast landfill site called Flower Island. Populated by those driven from the city by poverty, it is here that 14-year-old Bugeye and his mother arrive, following his father's internment in a 're-education camp'. As Bugeye and his mother settle into living among the strange...

On 18th May 1980, student activists gathered in the South Korean city of Gwangju to protest the coup d’état and martial law government of General Chun Doo-hwan. The security forces responded with unmitigated violence, and over the next ten days, hundreds of students, activists, and citizens were arrested, tortured, and murdered. The events of the uprising shaped over a decade...

In the evening of his life, a wealthy man begins to wonder if he might have missed the point. Parl Minwoo is a success story. Born into poverty in a miserable neighbourhood of Seoul, he has ridden the wave of development in his country. Now the director of a large architectural firm, his hard work and ambition have brought him...

A modern-day quest novel from one of Korea's most renowned novelists, Princess Bari tells the story of a young girl, frail and brave, who escapes from famine and death in North Korea in the 1990s. Seeking refuge in China before crossing oceans in the hold of a cargo ship, she disembarks in London, with its strange mix of different cultures,...