Cho Nam-Joo

Cho Nam-Joo is the author of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 (2016), one of the most consequential works of fiction to emerge from South Korea in a generation. The novel — a spare, documentary-style account of one ordinary Korean woman's experience of everyday sexism, from childhood through marriage — sold over a million copies in Korea and sparked a ferocious national conversation about gender inequality that is still ongoing.

Translated into more than twenty languages and adapted into a film starring Jung Yu-mi, the novel arrived in the English-speaking world in 2020 and found an immediate audience. Cho, who worked as a television screenwriter before writing the book, marshals her facts and incidents with the calm precision of a prosecutor building a case. The result is devastating. Her subsequent novel Saha, a dystopian account of a society divided between residents and non-residents, demonstrated that she was more than a phenomenon — she is a writer of real ambition and range.