Kim Ja-rim

Kim Ja-rim was a Korean playwright, essayist, and teacher. She was the first professional Korean female playwright.
Her childhood name was Kim Chŏngsuk.

Life

Kim was born in Pyongyang during the period that Korea was under Japanese rule. She was the third daughter of nine children. Her father was a professor of pharmacy whose family followed traditional Confucian principles, and her mother was a Christian elementary school graduate. When she was young, Kim's mother was ill, so she was raised in "an enlightened and liberal environment" by her maternal grandmother.
After dropping out of Pyongyang Normal School, she worked as a teacher in Pyongyang before moving to Seoul in 1949. She married the poet in 1952, marrying for love rather than a traditional arranged marriage. She continued to work as a teacher before making her debut in 1959 as a playwright with Dolgae-baram, a one-act play published by Chosun Ilbo, South Korea's oldest daily newspaper.

Work

Kim was the first professional Korean female playwright, among a group of others who wrote and had their work performed beginning in the 1960s, called the 'first generation of women playwrights' by scholar Lee Mi Won. According to Kim, she chose a career in drama because she believed in the social functions of art to "lead culture, purify emotion, and reveal humanity."
In 1959, she published her debut one-act play, Dolgae-baram. She received sharp criticism for it, the play being dismissed as a "common love story."
In 1965, she established the Women's Theater, a theatre company with the intention of "awakening" women through plays that dealt with women's issues from a female perspective.
Kim was the first female playwright to stage a play in the National Theater of Korea, her 1966 play Iminsun, which is considered to be her magnum opus. It features more than 28 characters on stage, and depicts a Korean farming community trying to move to Brazil to make more money.
An anthology of her early plays was published in 1971, also titled Iminsun.'''' This collection includes her 1970 one-act Hwa-don.
As of 1984, she had produced twenty plays, five radio and TV dramas, and one novel.