Ku Hyo-sŏ

Ku Hyo-sŏ
Hangeul	구효서
Hanja	具 孝 書
Revised Romanization	Gu Hyo-seo
McCune- Reischauer	Ku Hyosŏ
See also : Korean name

Ku Hyo-sŏ (born September 25, 1958 in Ganghwa- gun, Incheon ) is a South Korean writer .

Life

Ku Hyo-sŏ was born in Incheon on September 25, 1958. He began his writing career with the publication of his short story Madi (마디). Since then, Ku has published more than twenty novels and short story volumes. His literary style is very broad, to such an extent that no other Korean author is as difficult to categorize as he is. For this reason he is often referred to as the 'writer nomad'. In this respect, he has pursued and experimented with new, diverse styles countless times. Since Ku grew up in a village with no electricity or radio , he marvels at the fact that he lives in an era when you can see the whole world at a glance through television and the Internet . He can be described as a writer who is constantly looking for new directions in literature without turning his back on the rapid changes in society.

Ku's early works are known for their realistic style, which focuses on history and society. His debut work Madi addresses the suffering of women in modern Korean history, from the period from the Korean War to the Gwangju uprising . The stories in his first anthology, Whether the sunrise will come again (노을 은 다시 뜨는가) depict how the suffering of modern history lives on in the suffering of individual individuals.

In the 1990s , Ku began to explore a number of possibilities in narrative literature. In addition to his novel Radio, Radio (라디오 라디오), which romantically tells of folk tunes and traditional agrarian society, his second anthology Da Was A Loudspeaker And Da Was A Sagittarius (확성기 가 있었고 저격병 이 있었다) covers the brutality behind the mechanism of information on. The short stories in his anthology Your narrow cheeks (그녀 의 야윈 뺨) are captivating because of their symbolic and fantastic structures, which call into question the meaning of creative writing and that of the literary institution. The anthology The village without a can opener (깡통 따개 가 없는 마을) and the novel A Strange Summer (낯선 여름) address the emptiness of urban life in an industrialized society.

Work

Korean (excerpt)

Short stories edited volumes

• 노을 은 다시 뜨는가 Whether the sunrise will come again (1990)
• 확성기 가 있었고 저격병 이 있었다 There Was A Loudspeaker And There Was A Sagittarius (1993)
• 깡통 따개 가 없는 마을 The village without a can opener (1995)

Novels

• 늪 을 건너는 법 How to Cross a Swamp (1991)
• 낯선 여름 A Strange Summer (1994)
• 라디오 라디오 radio, radio (1995)
• 비밀 의 문 1,2 The Secret Door (in two volumes) (1996)
• 오남리 이야기 The story of Onam Village (1998)
• 악당 임꺽정 1,2 Im Kkŏk-chŏng, the criminal (in two volumes) (2000)
• 나가사키 파파 Nagasaki Papa (2007)

Awards

• 1994: 한국 일보 문학상 ( Hankook Ilbo Literature Prize )
• 2007: 허균 문학 작가상 ( Hŏgyun Literature Author Award )
• 2007: 한무숙 문학상 ( Han Mu-suk Literature Prize )
• 2013: EBS 라디오 문학상 우수상 ( EBS Radio Literature Prize, 2nd place )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ 두산 백과: 구효서 Retrieved February 2, 2014 (Korean)
2. ↑ 네이버 인물 검색: 구효서 Retrieved February 2, 2014 (Korean)

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Korean. Ku is the family name here, Hyo-sŏ is the first name.