Pyun Hye-young

Hye-young Pyun is a South Korean author whose fiction plumbs the darkest recesses of domestic life and institutional failure with a cold, surgical precision that has earned her comparisons to Patricia Highsmith and Thomas Harris. Her thriller The Hole (2016) follows a man who wakes from a coma to find himself paralysed, his wife dead, and his care entrusted to a mother-in-law who has never liked him — a scenario that unfolds with the slow, inexorable logic of a nightmare.

City of Ash and Red, set in a nameless city in the grip of a plague and bureaucratic indifference, further demonstrates Pyun's gift for constructing suffocating atmospheres of dread. She received the Yi Sang Literary Award and her work has been translated into numerous languages. What distinguishes her from pure genre horror is her interest in the violence that ordinary social arrangements do to ordinary people — the horror in her fiction is always recognisable.