Moonji Classics
한국 문학의 최전선의 에너지를 가장 먼저 만날 수 있는 곳
The Complete
Works of
Oh Junghee
Oh Junghee was born in 1947 in Seoul and graduated from Seorabeol Art College’s creative writing program in 1970. She has won the 1968 The JoongAng Ilbo New Writers Award for “The Woman at the Toy Store,” the 1979 Yi Sang Literary Award for “Evening Games,” the 1982 Dong-in Literary Award for “The Bronze Mirror,” and other distinguished awards such as the 1996 Dongseo Literary Award, the 1996 Oh Yeong-su Literary Award, the 2008 Contemporary Buddhist Literature Award, the 2012 Korean Culture and Arts Award, and the 2021 Manhae Prize for Literature. She is also the recipient of the LiBeratur Award for the German translation of her novel The Bird in 2003, which is the first Korean work to have ever received international recognition, hence a remarkable milestone in the history of Korean literature. A member of the National Academy of Arts, Republic of Korea, Oh Junghee is the author of the short story collections The River of Fire, The Garden of My Childhood, The Spirit of the Wind, The Fireworks, the flash fiction collections A Pig Dream and The Autumn Woman, the novel The Bird, and the children’s book It Will Be Morning When You Open the Door, as well as The Pattern of My Mind and many other essay collections.
of contemporary women
writers of Korea.
Over the past sixty years, she has lived as a novelist since her debut in 1968, Oh Junghee has been accompanied by more than a handful of labels, such as “the model novelist,” “the writer of writers,” and “the pinnacle of short story aesthetics.” With the layers of intense imagery, rich symbolism, poetic prose, and elaborate structure that weaves memory and re ality, Oh Junghee’s writing has explored and delved into the depth of existence apprehend ed by primordial anxiety and malaise. Early in her career, the author has already achieved the status of the living canon with her fiction works, loaded with meticulous, secretive, frightening beauty, in which relentlessly crisscrossing disobedience and conformity, order and chaos, complacency and desire to escape push the readers from their personal history into the deeper, mythical past. Placing her at the helm of contemporary woman writers in Korea, Oh’s literary achievement is unparalleled for her figuration of the intimate emo tions felt through the female body, life, and identity amid the patriarchal system rooted ever so deeply in Korean society throughout the war and industrialization.
• The Garden of My Childhood(2017)
• The Spirit of the Wind(2017)
• The Fireworks(2017)
• The Bird(2017)
• The River of Fire(2017)