The Soyo Workshop is a pottery studio outside of Seoul that takes its name from the words for ..read more

Healing fiction is currently hugely popular in South Korea, and has been since the 2022 release of Welcome ..read more

BTS are one of the biggest pop culture phenomena to emerge in the 21st century, a fragmented era ..read more

Washington officials have long found Pyongyang a bedeviling problem. Much of their frustration has come from a lack ..read more

It seems that so little solid, verifiable information has reached the outside world from North Korea since the ..read more

A 2016 Associated Press article entitled “S Korea covered up mass abuse, killings of ‘vagrants’” told the English-speaking world about one of the biggest human rights abuses in modern South Korean history. In the 1980s, in the run-up to  the Seoul Olympics, President Chun Doo-hwan’s dictatorship intensified a crackdown on “undesirables”, rounding them up and “rehabilitating” them. At one of the largest rehabilitation centers, known as the Brothers Home, the rehabilitation in fact consisted of slave labour and institutionalized physical and psychological abuse. Sexual violence was especial ..read more

Tracy O’Neill was adopted from South Korea in the 1980s and never thought to search for her birth mother until 2020 when the world seemed to stop. She had just landed a tenure-track position at Vassar and had broken up with a long-term boyfriend. With more time on her hands—teaching online and not leaving her new apartment much—she had the desire to find her birth mother in Korea. The story of her search, discovery and meeting her mother is the subject of her third book, Woman of Interest. This is hardly the first adoption memoir, but O’Neill is a writer of some pedigree with a couple of novel ..read more

Publisher Oxford University Press hails Activism and Post-activism as the first-ever English language work on the birth and development of South Korean nonfiction film. Drawing on more than 200 films and videos, Jihoon Kim’s trailblazing book charts the history of documentary filmmaking in the South from its early “activism” period in the 1980s to what the author calls its modern “post-activism” period in the late ’90s and 2000s. In doing so, Kim highlights the work of marginalized groups—including women, sexual minorities, and the working class—who, without the ease of access modern technolog ..read more

Janet Poole, a professor at the University of Toronto, in Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories has translated into English a collection of works by Choe Myong-ik, a writer whom she calls in her introductory essay an “exquisite architect of the short story form”. Following her essay, Poole presents nine stories, five from the colonial era (published from 1936 to 1941) and four in the postwar period (published from 1946 to 1952). Apart from “Walking in the Rain”, which she published in a bilingual edition in 2015, the stories in this book are available in English for the first time. Choe Myon ..read more

Examining the omnipresence of grief and revolution in South Korea for women and the queer community, as well as the whole nation after the sinking of the MV Sewol in April 2014, Hwang Jungeun’s dd’s Umbrella presents twin novellas from the perspective of two distinct narrators. The first story, simply titled “d”, follows a gender-nonconforming character named d as they navigate tragic events, from the sudden death of their partner dd to the Sewol ferry disaster that left 300 dead. “There Is Nothing that Needs to Be Said”, the subsequent story, is told from the first-person perspective of Kim S ..read more