K
Kim Man-jung
🇰🇷South Korea
Kim Man-jung (1637–1692) was a Joseon Dynasty scholar-official and writer whose novel A Dream of Nine Clouds (Kuunmong, c. 1689) is one of the masterworks of classical Korean literature. Written in a Chinese literary tradition but suffused with Buddhist and Confucian philosophy, it tells the story of a monk who dreams an entire lifetime of worldly success and romantic love, only to awaken to the illusory nature of all desire.
The novel is remarkable for its sophistication and its beauty — a work that uses the dream-within-dream structure to ask fundamental questions about consciousness and attachment. Kim wrote it, according to tradition, to comfort his exiled mother. It remains one of the essential texts of the Korean literary tradition.
