For That Which Cannot Be Restored

Park Wanseo was a South Korean writer. Born in what is now North Korea in 1931, she moved to Seoul to study literature. Her education was disrupted in the first month when the Korean War broke out, and she made a living working at an American military base. It wasn’t until 1970 that she became a published author. Park’s debut novel was inspired by her own memories of war, which she continued to draw from early in her career. Her later works explored the bourgeois concerns of middle-class Koreans and paint a portrait of women’s lives in a deeply patriarchal society. By the time of her death in 2011, Park Wanseo was one of Korea’s most revered and prolific writers, leaving behind over fifteen novels and ten short story collections. Soobin Kim is a freelance journalist and was the winner of the Strangers Press Korean Translation Competition, sponsored by LTI Korea, of which this publication forms the culmination. Formerly based in London, she now travels the world in search of stories.