Yi Cheong-jun

Yi Chŏng-jun (1939–2008) was one of the most intellectually ambitious Korean novelists of the twentieth century, a writer whose work grappled with the relationship between art, suffering, and the search for authentic expression. His fiction drew on the traditional music and storytelling forms of Korea to probe questions about what it means to create, and at what human cost.

His novel Your Paradise and the story "The Wounded" — later the basis for Im Kwon-taek's celebrated film Seopyeonje — are among the most moving accounts of the pansori tradition in Korean literature. Yi was preoccupied throughout his career with the tension between beauty and pain, arguing in his fiction that the deepest artistic expression is inseparable from grief. He received the Yi Sang Literary Award and the Republic of Korea Literary Award.