Lee Seung-woo's 'Buoyancy of the Mind' Wins Yi Sang Literary Award Grand Prize

"Typical Form of Short Story... Mother-Child Guilt and Sense of Obligation Combined with Real-Life Issues"

Mr. Lee Seung-woo's novel Buoyancy of the Mind was selected as the grand prize winner of this year's Yi Sang Literary Award. Park Hyung-seo's The World of 97, Yoon Sung-hee's Black Hole, Jang Eun-jin's My Romanian Language Class, Chun Woon-young's Become a Father, and Han Ji-soo's The Nightly Passionate Theater Club were chosen as outstanding works.

Munhak Sasang announced the results of the Yi Sang Literary Award judging on the 4th. Established in 1977, this award is a prestigious honor with a tradition of recipients including Lee Mun-yeol, Lee Cheong-jun, Choi In-ho, Shin Kyung-sook, and Kim Hoon. Last year, the winners Kim Geum-hee, Choi Eun-young, and Lee Ki-ho refused the award citing unfair contracts, sparking controversy. They opposed demands to transfer copyright of the winning works for three years and restrictions preventing them from featuring the works as the title pieces in their personal short story collections. The 2018 grand prize winner Yoon Yi-hyung also joined the criticism and declared a literary boycott, turning it into a refusal movement. Munhak Sasang apologized for the lack of awareness regarding copyright and revised the conditions to set the publication rights for one year.

The award ceremony, which resumed with difficulty, was conducted by receiving nominations from about 200 people including literary critics, novelists, literary magazine editors, literary journalists, and literature professors, based on short and medium-length stories published in major literary magazines last year. The judging panel commented on the grand prize-winning work Buoyancy of the Mind, saying, "It excellently demonstrates the typical form of short stories not only in terms of novelistic structure and character creation but also through precise depiction of characters' inner worlds and elegant prose style." They added, "Although it contains brief family stories commonly seen in daily life, it successfully combines the somewhat heavy and abstract themes of debt and guilt between a son and his mother with various social and ethical real-world issues in a novelistic way."

Mr. Lee expressed his thoughts, saying, "I am reflecting on how such a heavy award came to me. Instead of questioning the reasons, I intend to return to my work because I believe questioning is not my right, and above all, because I have been given more work to do." Regarding his work, he introduced it as "a novel that explores the hearts of those left behind who can no longer ignore the words left by the departed, and those who are tormented by loss and guilt, held captive by those words. It is like a belated excuse that the survivors lay out to the departed."

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