Born in 1966 in Nonsan, Chungcheongnam-do, Ra Heeduk studied Korean Literature at Yonsei University. She made her literary debut with a selection of poetry in the annual contest hosted by the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper in 1989. She has authored poetry collections, To Roots, Those Words Have Colored the Leaves, That Place isn't Far Away, What is Darkening, Scale and Stairs, and Wild Apple, a poetry criticism collection, Whence Comes the Color Purple, and the prose collection Half a Container of Water. She has received the Kim Su-yeong Literary Award, the Today's Young Artist Award from the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Contemporary Literature Prize, the Yi San Literature Award and the Sowol Poetry Prize. She is currently a professor of Creative Writing at Chosun University.
