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Authors by Country · South KoreaThe Best Korean Authors to Read
Korean literature has reached English readers in large numbers only recently, helped by Han Kang’s International Booker win in 2016 and her Nobel Prize in 2024. Behind that moment sits a century of writing shaped by Japanese colonial rule, the division of the peninsula, the Korean War, dictatorship and rapid industrialisation. The writers here range from 1930s modernism to contemporary horror and feminist fiction, and each one can be read in English translation today.
The list is ordered chronologically by year of birth, so it doubles as a short history of modern Korean writing. Every author has at least one book available in English; translators are named where known. Writers are South Korean unless stated otherwise, and the starting book given for each is the most accessible way in.
Twelve Korean authors, and where to start with each
Yi Sang
1910–1937 · Keijō (Seoul), Korea under Japanese rule
Yi Sang was the pen name of Kim Haegyŏng, the leading experimental writer of colonial-era Korea. His poems play with numbers, diagrams and repetition, and his fiction turns inward to idle, alienated narrators in the modern city. The poem sequence Crow’s Eye View appeared in a Seoul newspaper in 1934.
He died in Tokyo in 1937, aged 26, and his reputation has only grown since. The Wave Books volume Yi Sang: Selected Works (2020), translated by Don Mee Choi, Jack Jung, Joyelle McSweeney and Sawako Nakayasu, gathers poems, stories and essays in one place.
Read Yi Sang if you want to see where Korean modernism began.
Start with Wings (1936). A narrator hides in the dark back half of a partitioned room he shares with his wife, trying to work out how she earns her money; included in Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books, 2020). Or Crow’s Eye View (1934). A sequence of fifteen experimental poems first serialised in the Joseon Jungang Ilbo newspaper, also in Selected Works.
Park Wan-suh
1931–2011 · Gaepung, Gyeonggi (now in North Korea)
Park Wan-suh debuted at nearly forty with The Naked Tree (1970) and went on to become one of the most widely read Korean novelists of her generation. Her fiction returns to the Korean War, the divided family, and the lives of middle-class women in a fast-changing South Korea.
Her autobiographical novel Who Ate Up All the Shinga? (1992), translated by Yu Young-nan and Stephen J. Epstein (Columbia University Press, 2009), follows her childhood from rural Gaepung under colonial rule to wartime Seoul. Bora Chung has named her as an influence.
Read Park if you want the Korean War seen from inside one family.
Start with Who Ate Up All the Shinga? (1992). An autobiographical novel of a girlhood in the countryside and in Seoul from the colonial period to the Korean War, translated by Yu Young-nan and Stephen J. Epstein. Or The Naked Tree (1970). Her debut novel, set in Seoul during the Korean War and centred on a young woman named Kyung-a, translated by Yu Young-nan (Cornell, 1995).
Ko Un
Born 1933 · Gunsan, Korea under Japanese rule
Ko Un spent about a decade as a Buddhist monk from 1952 before returning to lay life and becoming a prominent poet and pro-democracy activist. His central work, Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives), is a thirty-volume series of short poetic portraits of people he knew or read about, begun after his 1980 arrest by the military government.
He is among the most widely translated Korean poets, much of it by Brother Anthony of Taizé. In 2018 several women accused him of sexual misconduct; his poems were removed from South Korean textbooks and he withdrew from public life in Korea. Readers may weigh that context.
Read Ko Un if you want a panoramic portrait of twentieth-century Korean lives in verse.
Start with Ten Thousand Lives (1986). Selections from the first ten volumes of Maninbo, translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé, Young-moo Kim and Gary Gach (Green Integer, 2005). Or Maninbo: Peace and War. A further selection from Maninbo, translated by Brother Anthony and Lee Sang-wha (Bloodaxe, 2015).
Hwang Sok-yong
Born 1943 · Xinjing (now Changchun), Manchukuo
Hwang Sok-yong writes large historical novels about division, war and working lives left out of official histories. He was jailed for political reasons more than once; in 1993 he was sentenced to seven years under the National Security Law and was released after about five, following a 1998 pardon.
Mater 2-10 (2020), translated by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2024. The Guest deals with a wartime massacre in what is now North Korea.
Read Hwang if you want Korea’s twentieth century told through workers and survivors.
Start with Mater 2-10 (2020). A multigenerational novel about railway workers and their families in Yeongdeungpo, Seoul, from the colonial era onwards, translated by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae (Scribe). Or The Guest (2001). A minister living in America returns to his home village in the North, where his brother took part in a wartime massacre, translated by Kyung-Ja Chun and Maya West (Seven Stories Press).
Kyung-sook Shin
Born 1963 · near Jeongeup, North Jeolla
Kyung-sook Shin (Shin Kyung-sook in Korean order) writes quiet, emotionally direct novels about family, memory and the move from the countryside to the city. Please Look After Mom sold about a million copies in South Korea within ten months and won the Man Asian Literary Prize, announced in 2012, the first time a woman had won.
More of her novels are available in English, including I’ll Be Right There (translated by Sora Kim-Russell), The Court Dancer, Violets and I Went to See My Father (all three translated by Anton Hur). In 2015 she faced plagiarism accusations over a passage resembling Yukio Mishima, and apologised.
Read Shin if you want a family novel that ends up being about a mother.
Start with Please Look After Mom (2008). When a 69-year-old woman goes missing in a Seoul subway station, her family’s search reveals how little they knew her; translated by Chi-Young Kim (Knopf, 2011).
Cheon Myeong-kwan
Born 1964 · Yongin, Gyeonggi
Cheon Myeong-kwan worked for a film production company and wrote screenplays before turning to fiction. His novel Whale won the Munhakdongne Novel Award in 2004: a sprawling, larger-than-life tale of ambition set in a South Korea moving into modernity.
Whale, translated by Chi-Young Kim (Europa Editions, 2023), was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023. It suits readers who like picaresque storytelling with folk-tale exaggeration.
Read Cheon if you want a big, bawdy fable of modern Korea.
Start with Whale (2004). Three linked women in a remote village: a driven entrepreneur, her mute daughter who communicates with an elephant, and a one-eyed woman who commands bees; translated by Chi-Young Kim.
Bae Suah
Born 1965 · Seoul
Bae Suah debuted in 1993 and writes fragmented, dreamlike fiction in which time slips, identities blur and plot matters less than atmosphere. She learned German during a stay in Germany and also works as a translator.
Several of her books are in English, most translated by Deborah Smith: A Greater Music, Recitation and Untold Night and Day; Nowhere to Be Found was translated by Sora Kim-Russell. Her work suits readers drawn to experimental, European-leaning prose.
Read Bae if you like fiction that feels like a waking dream.
Start with Untold Night and Day (2013). A young woman who worked at Seoul’s only audio theatre for the blind spends a hot night and day searching for a missing friend as reality starts to unravel; translated by Deborah Smith (Jonathan Cape, 2020).
All Bae Suah books →Kim Young-ha
Born 1968 · Hwacheon
Kim Young-ha writes sharp, urban, often dark fiction about alienation, violence and identity in contemporary South Korea. His first novel, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (1996), introduced a cool, detached style; Black Flower (2003) follows Korean migrant workers in early-twentieth-century Mexico.
Several of his books have been filmed, including Memoir of a Murderer (2017), based on his 2013 novel about a serial killer with dementia. Early English editions credit him as Young-ha Kim.
Read Kim if you want noir-tinged literary fiction set in modern Seoul.
Start with I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (1996). A detached narrator who helps clients end their lives observes two brothers drawn to the same young woman in Seoul; translated by Chi-Young Kim (Harcourt, 2007). Or Diary of a Murderer and Other Stories (2013). The title work, his 2013 novel about a retired serial killer with dementia, collected with other stories and translated by Krys Lee (2019).
Han Kang
Born 1970 · Gwangju
Han Kang writes spare, intense fiction about the body, violence and grief, from a woman who stops eating meat to the 1980 Gwangju Uprising. She won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for The Vegetarian and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024, cited for prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.
Most of her English editions are translated by Deborah Smith, including The Vegetarian and Human Acts; We Do Not Part (2021) was translated by Emily Yae Won and Paige Aniyah Morris (2025).
Read Han Kang if you want the writer who brought Korean fiction to a global audience.
Start with The Vegetarian (2007). After a disturbing dream, a Seoul housewife stops eating meat, and her family responds with force; translated by Deborah Smith (Portobello, 2015). Or Human Acts (2014). Seven linked chapters that start from the death of a boy in the May 1980 Gwangju Uprising and follow those around him into the present; translated by Deborah Smith (Portobello, 2016).
All Han Kang books →Hye-young Pyun
Born 1972 · Seoul
Hye-young Pyun (Pyun Hye-young in Korean order) writes unsettling literary fiction in which ordinary lives slide into dread. She has won major Korean prizes including the Dong-in Literary Award (2012) and the Yi Sang Literary Award (2014).
The Hole won the Shirley Jackson Award for best novel in 2017. Her translator Sora Kim-Russell has also translated City of Ash and Red, The Law of Lines and The Owl Cries, and co-translated the story collection To the Kennels.
Read Pyun if you like slow-building psychological suspense.
Start with The Hole (2016). A man paralysed in a car crash that killed his wife is left in the care of his grieving mother-in-law, who starts digging holes in the garden; translated by Sora Kim-Russell (Arcade, 2017).
Bora Chung
Born 1976 · Seoul
Bora Chung writes horror, fantasy and science fiction that uses the uncanny to address patriarchy and capitalism. She holds a PhD in Slavic literature, has taught Russian literature and science fiction studies at Yonsei University, and translates Polish books.
Cursed Bunny, translated by Anton Hur and published by Honford Star, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022 and longlisted for the US National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2023. Your Utopia followed in English in 2024.
Read Chung if you want strange, darkly funny stories with a political edge.
Start with Cursed Bunny (2017). A collection of horror and fantasy stories, including a tale built around a cursed rabbit; translated by Anton Hur (Honford Star, 2021). Or Your Utopia. A second story collection, also translated by Anton Hur (2024).
Cho Nam-joo
Born 1978 · South Korea
Cho Nam-joo spent almost a decade as a television scriptwriter on current-affairs programmes before turning to fiction. Her novels use plain, reportorial prose to examine the everyday pressures on women in South Korea.
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 (2016) sold more than a million copies, set off wide debate about gender inequality and was filmed in 2019. Jamie Chang’s English translation appeared in 2020.
Read Cho if you want a short, direct novel about gender in modern Korea.
Start with Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 (2016). A 33-year-old mother who gave up her job begins speaking in the voices of other women, and her life story traces the discrimination behind it; translated by Jamie Chang (2020).
Which Korean author should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For a first Korean novel — Han Kang, The Vegetarian (2007)
- For family and memory — Kyung-sook Shin, Please Look After Mom (2008)
- For history and politics — Hwang Sok-yong, Mater 2-10 (2020)
- For horror and the uncanny — Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny (2017)
- For gender and society — Cho Nam-joo, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 (2016)
- For experimental prose — Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day (2013)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
Who is the most famous Korean author?
Han Kang is the best-known Korean writer internationally. She won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for The Vegetarian and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024.
What is a good first Korean book to read in English?
The Vegetarian by Han Kang and Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin are both short, widely available and translated into English. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo is another accessible starting point.
Which Korean books have been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize?
The Vegetarian won in 2016 and Han Kang’s The White Book was shortlisted in 2018. Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny (2022) and Cheon Myeong-kwan’s Whale (2023) were also shortlisted, and Hwang Sok-yong’s Mater 2-10 was shortlisted in 2024.
Who translates Korean literature into English?
Leading translators include Deborah Smith (Han Kang, Bae Suah), Anton Hur (Bora Chung, Kyung-sook Shin), Sora Kim-Russell (Hye-young Pyun, Hwang Sok-yong), Chi-Young Kim (Kyung-sook Shin, Kim Young-ha, Cheon Myeong-kwan) and Brother Anthony of Taizé (Ko Un).
Why are Korean names written in different orders?
Korean names put the family name first, as in Han Kang or Cho Nam-joo. Some English editions reverse this, so Shin Kyung-sook appears as Kyung-sook Shin and Pyun Hye-young as Hye-young Pyun; this list uses the form on the English covers.
Are there Korean horror or speculative fiction books in English?
Yes. Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny mixes horror and fantasy, and Hye-young Pyun’s The Hole won the Shirley Jackson Award for best novel in 2017.
Start with the author whose questions interest you most. The book you remember longest may not be the one with the clearest answers, but the one that changes how you see something familiar.
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