Jung Young-moon


Jung Young-moon is a South Korean writer.

Biography

Jung Young-moon was born in Hamyang, South Korea in 1965. He graduated from Seoul National University with a degree in psychology. His literary début was in 1996 with the novel A Man Who Barely Exists. Jung is also an accomplished translator who has translated more than forty books from English into Korean. In 1999 he won the 12th Dongseo Literary Award with his collection of short stories, A Chain of Dark Tales. In 2003, the Korean National Theater produced his play The Donkeys. In 2005 Jung was invited to participate in the University of Iowa's International Writing Program, and in 2010 the University of California at Berkeley's Center for Korea Study invited him to participate in a three-month-long residency program.

Work

Jung's debut, the novel A Man who Barely Exists was published in Jakga Segye in 1996, and as a novel two years later. The novel portrays a man mired in ennui, in which state he contemplates the meaning of life. Following this he released collections and novels including Black Chain Stories, Pale Soliloquy, Yawn and, most recently, A Contrived World.
Black Chain Stories is a collection of Kafkaesque short stories, which delve into the question of what being means, and what the loss of being means.
The Korea Literature Translation Institute summarizes Jung's work:
In his role as translator, Jung has translated a wide range of work including John Fowles' Ebony Tower, Raymond Carver's What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, and Germaine Greer's The Boy.

Awards

Works in English

  • A Chain of Dark Tales
  • A Most Ambiguous Sunday and Other Stories
  • Vaseline Buddha
  • ''Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River''

Works in Korean (Partial)

  • A Man who Barely Exists
  • Black Chain Stories
  • Pale Soliloquy
  • Yawn
  • ''A Contrived World''