Author: Hwang Sok-yong
Translated by: Anton Hur, Sora Kim-Russell
Publisher: Verso, 2021
Original title: 수인 1: 경계를 넘다 | 수인 2: 불꽃 속으로, 2017
Link to online store *
In 1993, writer and democracy activist Hwang Sok-yong was sentenced to five years in the Seoul Detention Center. Hwang’s imprisonment forced him to consider the many prisons to which he was subject—of thought, of writing, of Cold War nations, of the heart.
In this capacious memoir, Hwang moves between his imprisonment and his life—as a boy in Pyongyang, as a young activist protesting South Korea’s military dictatorships, as a soldier in the Vietnam War, as a dissident writer—and in so doing, narrates the dramatic revolutions and transformations of one life and of Korean society during the twentieth century.
Source: publisher’s website:
LKL says:
Hwang Sok-yong’s memoir makes for essential reading as literary history: most of his best-known pre-Guest writings are name-checked and the circumstances and inspiration for their composition described. But many will read the book as social and political history, documenting as it does Hwang’s involvement in the resistance movements protesting about the inequitable treatment of workers under the developmental dictatorship of Park Chung-hee.
LKL rating: 
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Entry on Goodreads.com here.
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