Kong Ji-young

Gong Ji-young is one of South Korea's most beloved and socially engaged novelists, a writer whose fiction has consistently championed those crushed by institutional power. Born in Seoul in 1963, she is known for novels that respond directly to real-world injustice: Our Happy Time (2005), a death-row love story that became a major film, and Do Not Say You Have No Recourse to Silence — inspired by the Gwangju Massacre — are among her most powerful works.

Her novel Dogani (Silenced, 2009), based on the real-life abuse of deaf children at a special school, caused such a public outcry upon its publication that it led directly to legislative reform in South Korea. Few contemporary authors can claim to have changed the law. Gong writes with moral urgency and without sentimentality, trusting her readers to bear the full weight of what she shows them.