The Prisoner: A Memoir

In this capacious memoir, Hwang's life is set against the volatile political backdrop of modern Korea, a country subject to colonialism, Cold War division, a devastating war, decades of authoritarian dictatorships, a mass democratic uprising, & a still-lingering, painful division between North & South.

The Prisoner moves between Hwang's imprisonment & scenes from his life—as a boy in Pyongyang & Seoul, as a young activist protesting South Korea’s military dictatorships, as a soldier in the Vietnam War, as a dissident writer first traveling abroad—and in so doing, braids his extraordinary life into the dramatic revolutions & transformations of Korean society during the twentieth century.

Hwang Sok-yong was born in 1943 & is arguably Korea’s most renowned author. In 1993, he was sentenced to 7 years in prison for an unauthorised trip to the North to promote exchange between artists in the two Koreas. Five years later, he was released on a special pardon by the new president. The recipient of Korea’s highest literary prizes, he has been shortlisted for the Prix Femina Etranger & was awarded the Emile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature for his book At Dusk.

Sora Kim-Russell has translated numerous works of Korean fiction, including Hwang Sok-yong’s Princess Bari (Garnet Publishing, 2015), Familiar Things (Scribe, 2017), and At Dusk (Scribe, 2018), which was longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize.