Kyung-Sook Shin

Kyung-Sook Shin is one of South Korea's most widely read and internationally celebrated authors, a writer whose fiction focuses on memory, family, and the women who hold Korean society together while remaining largely invisible to it. Born in 1963 in North Jeolla Province, she came of age during South Korea's democratic struggle and her early experiences of labour and political upheaval are present, if not always foregrounded, in her fiction.

Her breakthrough novel internationally was Please Look After Mom (2008), which opens with a mother going missing in Seoul's subway and unfolds through the perspectives of her children and husband, each of whom discovers, in their searching, how little they truly knew the woman at the centre of their lives. It won the Man Asian Literary Prize in English translation (by Chi-Young Kim) and became a global bestseller. Her earlier novel I'll Be Right There and her recent work have further demonstrated her range. She is a member of the National Academy of Arts of Korea.