Jeon Sang guk

Life

Jeon Sang-guk was born March 24, 1940 in Gangwon-do, Korea. Jeon graduated from Kyunghee University with a B.A. and M.A. in Korean literature. He worked, for many years, as a High School teacher and then at a professor of Korean Literature at Kangwon University.

Work

Jeon Sang-guk drew on his personal experiences in the Korean War and the ensuing division of the country to reconfirm the tragic consequences of these events. For Jeon, however, the real suffering is not in the War itself but in its aftermath, in the families ripped apart and the homes lost; and often, the War provides an opportunity to capture the drama of conflict and confrontation that exists in traditional human relationships. In Ah-be’s Family, the wounds left by the war is symbolized in a mentally disabled child of rape, abandoned by his mother who immigrates to the U.S. with her new family. The guilt-ridden mother, however, fails to find peace in the new land. The tragedy, therefore, is not only found in the rape and its by-product, the handicapped child, but also in the consequence of the attempt to escape the traumatic memories of it. Jeon’s serial novel, “The Road” (Gil), further investigates the aftermath of the war through the problem of isan gajok or families separated by the war and the division. In the 1980s, Jeon Sang Guk, who worked for a long time as a schoolteacher, expanded the scope of his literary topic to include problems in education. His stories “The Tears of an Idol” (Usangui nunmul), “The Squealing of Piglets” (Doeji saekkideurui ureum) and “The Eye of the Darkness” (Eumjiui nun) take the confined space of the school as a microcosmic setting, and explore the problematic relationships between teachers and students, as well as among the students themselves as they correlate to the similar issues in society at large.

Works in Translation

Works in Korean (Partial)

Short Story Collections

Awards