Ahn Jung-hyo is in town not just to talk about his novel Silver Stallion but also his Vietnam War novel White Badge, which will be screened at the KCC later in the week.
We reviewed Silver Stallion ten years ago but that won’t stop us reading it again.
Literature Night: Ahn Jung-hyo’s Silver Stallion
25 April, 19.00-21.00
Korean Cultural Centre | Grand Buildings | 1-3 Strand | London WC2N 5BW (Entrance in Northumberland Avenue)
Entrance Free – Booking Essential. Apply to [email protected] or call 020 7004 2600 with your name and contact details by Thursday 5th April.The booking system utilises a lottery based programme that picks names at random, once the final selection has been drawn we will send you an e-mail regarding the result of the selection.
You can pick up a copy of the book from the KCCUK, once you have received your confirmation e-mail.
About the book
Silver Stallion’s stage is a small South Korean village and its surrounding countryside. The central characters are a group of teenagers, particularly a young villager named Mansik, who change from boys into under-age men as the American invaders involve them and their fellow Koreans in the sordid moral and physical wreckage of the war. After being raped, Mansik’s mother joins the ”U.N. ladies” (also known as “Yankee wives”) in the occupied area called Texas Town and suffers the social consequences of prostitution. For Mansik and his friends, however, there is retreat into a realm of fantasy. As the war goes on around them, they search, as did their ancestors, for a secret cave, the home of a legendary warrior general who was sent by the gods to free Korea from the Mongols.
About the Author
Ahn was born in Seoul in 1941. He graduated from Sogang University with a BA in English literature in 1965 then worked as an English-language reporter, columnist, and editor at the Korea Times and Korea Herald.
Ahn made his debut as a translator in 1975, when he published a Korean translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez which was serialized in the monthly Literature & Thought. From that time until the late 1980s, he translated approximately 150 foreign works into Korean. He published his first novel titled White Badge, about the story of Korean participation in the Vietnam War.
