Jung-Myung Lee

Jung-Myung Lee is a South Korean novelist best known internationally for The Investigation (2012), an ingenious literary crime novel set in a Japanese colonial prison in 1944, where a young Korean guard becomes involved in the mystery of a prisoner's death — a prisoner who turns out to have been a brilliant poet.

The novel, a bestseller in Korea that was subsequently translated into many languages, is remarkable for its double focus: it is simultaneously a detective puzzle and a meditation on Korean literature under Japanese occupation, with the Japanese poet Yun Dong-ju — a real historical figure executed in prison in 1945 — at its centre. Lee writes with a historian's attention and a novelist's warmth, creating a tribute to literature's power to survive even the most violent suppression.