Ra Heeduck


Ra Heeduk is a South Korean poet. She debuted in 1989 with her poem "To the Roots". She received many literary awards such as the Kim Suyeong Literary Award, Contemporary Literature Award, Sowol Poetry Prize, and the Daesan Literary Awards.

Early life and education

Ra was born in Nonsan, South Chungcheong Province. She was raised in an orphanage in which her parents - Christians who sought to carry out the teachings of their religion through communal living - served on the administrative staff. She has confessed that the experience of living with orphans had made her a precocious child, and that the recognition of the difference between herself and her playmates early on gave her a unique perspective on the world.
She became interested in poetry in middle school. While struggling between the religious ideals fostered by her parents and the causes upheld by the student movement she encountered in college, she found relief in poetry. She graduated from the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Yonsei University with both Master's and Doctorate degrees.

Career

Ra debuted in 1989 after winning JoongAng Ilbo's New Writer's Award for her poem "To the Roots".
She served as a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at Chosun University from 2001 to 2018. In 2007, she participated in the International Writing Program. She has served as a professor at Seoul National [University of Science and Technology] since 2019.

Artistry

Ra's work shows the "generosity and warmth of the heart", which is "motherly instinct or love" that contains a "critical consciousness of the contradiction and irrationality in life and reality". Kim Jin-soo wrote that the advantage of her poem is "concise and restrained linguistic form based on the reality of concrete sensory images".
Her first collection of poems, To the Roots, and her second, The Words Stained the Leaves, pierce the fog of hypocrisy and contradictions cast over daily life while maintaining a spirit of forgiveness and warmth. In order to become receptive to nature, she believes it is necessary to "listen with her eyes and see with her ears." Such effort is detailed in her third collection of poetry, It's Not That Far From Here, and her fourth, What Is Darkening. She juxtaposes "sound" and "darkness" to signal the process of "listening" with the eyes when "seeing" becomes useless as darkness falls.

Work

Works in Korean

Poetry

  • To the Roots
  • The Words Stained the Leaves
  • It's Not That Far from Here
  • What Is Darkening
  • A Missing Palm
  • Wild Apple
  • Time for These Horses To Return
  • To Her
  • ''File Name: Lyric Poem''

Prose

  • A Half-Bucket of Water
  • Where Does Purple Come From?
  • Remember Those Lights
  • A Plate of Poems
  • ''I'm Going To Get There on Foot Step by Step''

Compilations

  • Morning Song, Evening Poetry
  • My Representative Poem
  • ''Na Huideok's Glass Bottle Letter''

Works in English

  • What Is Darkening - translated by Choi Jongyoll
  • Scale and Stairs: Selected Poems - translated by Christopher Merrill and Kim Won-Chung
  • Wild Apple - translated by William Parker and Youngsil Ji

Awards