Mokpo Literature Award Highest Honor: Kim Hyebin's Novel 'Geurai Ai' Wins Park Hwaseong Novel Award

Mokpo Literature Award for Best Novel Renamed as Park Hwaseong Novel Award
Winning Work Kim Hyebin's 'Guraiai'
Scheduled for Book Publication in September

On the 2nd, Munhakgwa Jiseongsa announced that Kim Hyebin's novel Geurai Ai was selected for this year's highest honor of the Mokpo Literary Award, the Park Hwaseong Novel Award. The Park Hwaseong Novel Award is the new name for the Mokpo Literary Award for novels, which began in 2021.

The winning work Geurai Ai deals with the story that unfolds when the identity of an ancient mummy excavated from an Irish peat bog (a coastal or wetland area where organic matter is buried and carbonized) is revealed to be Korean. Geurai Ai means "white" or "old woman" in Greek. U Chan-je, a literary critic and professor at Sogang University who served as a judge, commented, "It experiments with the possibility of a fantastic storyteller like a shaman's ventriloquist, traversing reality and fantasy."

Novelist Kim Hye-bin [Photo by Munhakgwa Jiseongsa]

Author Kim Hyebin is from Gwangju Metropolitan City and graduated from the Film Department and the Graduate School of Narrative Creation at Korea National University of Arts. This year, she won the Dong-A Ilbo New Writer's Contest with her novella Red Bull.

The Park Hwaseong Novel Award honors Park Hwaseong (1904?1988), a writer from Mokpo who wrote Baekhwa, the first novel by a Korean female author. From this year, Mokpo City and Munhakgwa Jiseongsa jointly host the award. The prize money is 70 million KRW, and the winning work will be published as a standalone book by Munhakgwa Jiseongsa.

The main prize of the Mokpo Writers Award went to Kim Miseung's collection of children's stories, The Moonlight Confectionery That Sells Dreams.

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