Novelist Yun Heung-gil Receives the 10th Park Kyung-ni Literary Award

Photo by Yonhap News

[Asia Economy Reporter Byunghee Park] Yoon Heung-gil (78, pictured), the author of the novel Jangma, was selected as the winner of the 10th Park Kyung-ni Literary Award on the 16th.

The Park Kyung-ni Literary Award judging committee stated, "Yoon Heung-gil's works seem to contain the primal aspects of life," and added, "Traditional order is also an ideological system that includes various contradictions inherent in humans, and his works excellently depict the complex contradictory relationships between tradition and ideological confrontation."

Yoon Heung-gil debuted in 1968 when his work The Season of the Gray Wreath won the Korea Daily New Year's Literary Contest. He wrote Jangma, Wanjang, and The Man Left with Nine Pairs of Shoes, and received the Hyundai Literature Award in 1983 for Wanjang.

In 2018, marking the 50th anniversary of his literary debut, Yoon Heung-gil published the large-scale novel Munsin, which he had been writing for 20 years. He mentioned that the advice from Park Kyung-ni (1926?2008) to write a grand novel was a great encouragement. Munsin is a novel depicting the conflicting beliefs, desires, and struggles of a family living during the Japanese colonial period, when the policy of Japanization and forced labor were at their peak.

The Park Kyung-ni Literary Award was established in 2011 as the first domestic world literature award to honor the literary spirit and achievements of Park Kyung-ni, the author of the epic novel Toji. This is the first time a Korean author has won since the first recipient, Choi In-hoon (1936?2018).

The prize money is 100 million won. The award ceremony will be held at 11:30 a.m. on the 24th of next month at the Toji Culture Center in Wonju, Gangwon Province.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.