Kyung-Sook Shin – författare

WINNER OF THE MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE

WINNER OF THE MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE 

When sixty-nine-year-old So-nyo is separated from her husband among the crowds of the Seoul subway station, her family begins a desperate search to find her. Yet as long-held secrets and private sorrows begin to reveal themselves, they are forced to wonder: how well did they actually know the woman they called Mom? Told through the piercing voices and urgent perspectives of a daughter, son, husband, and mother, Please Look After Mom is at once an authentic picture of contemporary life in Korea and a universal story of family love.

''A powerful, elegant page-turner'' J.M. Lee''Gentle yet piercing'' Kirkus ReviewsAfter losing her daughter in a tragic accident, Hon returns to her childhood home in the Korean countryside to look after her elderly father. There, the discovery of a chest of letters compels her to piece together the violent, vibrant story of his life.More than just a portrait of one man, I Went to See My Father asks us to look at the ones we love, uncover the secrets they keep, and finally see who they really are.Affectionate, epic, joyous and lasting, this is the perfect follow-up to beloved classic Please Look After Mother.Translated by Anton Hur

''Dreamy, immersive and evocative'' TLS''Darkly beautiful'' Frances Cha''Strange and gripping'' GuardianSan is twenty-two and alone when she happens upon a job at a flower shop in Seoul''s bustling city centre.Haunted by childhood rejection, she stumbles through life - painfully vulnerable, stifled, and unsure. She barely registers to others, especially by the ruthless standards of 1990s South Korea.But over the course of one summer, San meets a curious cast of characters: the nonspeaking shop owner, a brash co-worker, aggressive customers and an enigmatic magazine photographer. Fuelled by a quiet desperation to jump-start her life, she dares, briefly, to dream of connection in an unforgiving world.Translated by Anton Hur

The highly anticipated release of the most personal novel by Kyung-sook Shin, who first burst onto the literary scene with the New York Times bestseller Please Look after Mom

Homesick and alone, a teenage girl has just arrived in Seoul to work in a factory. Her family, still in the countryside, is too impoverished to keep sending her to school, so she works long, sunless days on a stereo assembly line, struggling through night school every evening in order to achieve her dream of becoming a writer.

Korea’s brightest literary star sets this complex and nuanced coming-of-age story against the backdrop of Korea’s industrial sweatshops of the 1970s and takes on the extreme exploitation, oppression, and urbanization that helped catapult Korea’s economy out of the ashes of war. But it was girls like Shin’s heroine who formed the bottom of Seoul’s rapidly changing social hierarchy, forgotten and ignored.

Richly autobiographical, The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness lays bare the conflict and confusion Shin faces as she confronts her past and the sweeping social change of the past half-century. Cited in Korea as one of the most important literary novels of the decade, this novel cements Shin’s legacy as one of the most insightful and exciting writers of her generation.