[News Figure] Writer Woo Sin-young Wins the Honbul Literature Award for 'City View'

Writer Woo Sin-young received the 14th Honbul Literary Award for her novel City View.

City View is a work that intricately portrays the portraits of modern city dwellers who struggle to maintain a smooth outward life despite suffering from obsession and deprivation, self-harm and industrial accidents, trauma, and more. Woo resigned from the university where she was working in February and wrote City View over two months from April to May.

At a press conference, Woo said, "Every time I see the transparently sparkling glass windows of buildings in Songdo, Incheon, I wonder how they can be kept so beautifully," adding, "I often come across articles about people who died while cleaning building windows, and each time I was shocked." She explained the background of writing the novel by saying, "I thought someone had to preserve their stories as narratives."

In City View, Woo vividly and dynamically unfolds the desires and wounds of various social classes that make up a city, from middle-aged middle-class people to young workers in their 20s and 30s struggling with unstable livelihoods, through complex and multi-dimensional characters. The Honbul Literary Award was established to honor the literary spirit of novelist Choi Myung-hee (1947?1998), who wrote the epic novel Honbul. It is awarded to full-length novels and selects winners regardless of whether they are new or established writers. The prize money is 70 million won.

Previously, she received the 30th Golden Goblin Award for her children's story Always Kind Porridge House (Biryoungso). Earlier this year, she also won the 1st Easy Book Reading Shami Children's Genre Story Award for her children's story Alice Fallen into a Manhole.

Woo graduated from Seoul National University with a degree in Korean Language Education and earned a doctorate from the same university's graduate school. She worked as a professor at Myongji University and Incheon National University before transforming into a novelist. She participated in the development of middle school Korean language textbooks, high school literature textbooks, high school literature overview approved books, and the 2018 textbook certification review.

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