Occupation Writer Genre Fiction Language Korean Name Kim Jung-hyuk | Nationality Korean Empire Role Author Period 2000-present | |
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Kim Jung-hyuk is a Korean author and cartoonist who is regarded as one of the writers who will help usher in the future of Korean literature.
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Life
Born in Kimcheon, North Gyeongsang Province in 1971 Kim possesses a diverse resume, including writing professional book reviews for an online bookstore, handling DVDs for a bookstore that specializes in art, writing music columns for a pop culture magazine, and writing for a restaurant industry magazine. In addition to literature, he is interested in a wide range of fields, including movies, music, and food—those around him refer to him as an “everything-ist” rather than a “novelist.” Given his interest in drawing and car- toons, he drew his own illustrations for his story collections and works freelance as a cartoonist. It is perhaps for that reason that he referred to himself in the author’s note of Penguin News as a collection of countless Lego bricks.
Work
Characters with unusual personalities or rare jobs also appear in his stories: a “conceptual inventor” who confines himself underground and invents useless concepts; a man who wanders in search of “Banana, Inc.” with a rough map left behind by a friend who committed suicide; a map surveyor who searches for his direction in life, using a wooden Eskimo map. While writing about trivial objects, unusual people, and unseen music, Kim Junghyuk has established himself as a writer who awakens readers to the warmth and importance of analog sensibilities in a digital age.
Kim's stories are considered on the outer fringe of Korean literature, and feature a nearly maniacal focus on the objects of his work. This focus on objects instead of characters is extremely unusual in Korean fiction. Kim Jung-hyuk always attempts to discover new approaches that no one else has delved into.
Works in Translation
Works in Korean (Partial)
Short Story Collections