Authors
Jo Kyung Ran Novelist South Korea
“Why do I write? It is an inevitable question for me. I eagerly want to know, but I've never succeeded in solving this question. I hope, in fact, that it will be the centripetal force in my life. Writing is like a birthmark on my back. I wouldn’t give up this spiritual archery for all the world. Because I always need something to fall back on. But if I were to be born again, I wouldn’t choose to be a writer. It is an extreme hardship as well.”
Kyung Ran (b. 1969) was born in Seoul and has lived there since. She studied Creative Writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts and debuted with the short story “French Optical” in 1996, which won the Donga Ilbo Literary Competition. The same year her novel Time for Baking Bread (1996) was awarded the 1st Munhakdongne New Writers Award. In 2002 she received the Today's Young Artist Award., and participated in the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa, USA. She also received the Contemporary Literature Prize for the short story “A Strait Gate” in 2003. Her other works include the novels Movement (1998), The Origin of the Family (1999)and We Have Met Before (2001), as well as the short-story collections French Optical (1997), My Purple Sofa (2000), Looking for the Elephant (2002) and The Ladle Story (2004). She has also written the essay Jo Kyung Ran’s Crocodile Story (illustrated by Junko Yamakusa, 2003).
Kyung Ran is noted for her delicate descriptions of mundane and seemingly trivial events. Rather than present these events objectively, she dwells on the impressions they make on her characters and tries to capture the ways in which external trivialities mirror the distorted worldview of the characters. Her minimalist descriptions often render her characters impersonal or distant, heightening the difficulty of communication in the modern world.
Participation Program
Round Table 3 Newness in my literature
Round Table 2 Newness in my literature
Round Table 1 Newness in my literature