Inkstone Gungnyeo: The Palace Women Gungnyeo, literally “palace women,” is a term referring to all women residing in the palace who were not members of the royal family. Lo and behold, Sujin’s head splits in two. Like the predictable calm before a storm. She begins at the top of her head and pulls the line past her eyebrows, down the mound of her nose, and brushes it vertically across her lips. Jiyeon goes to the house of her grandmother Young-ok, whom she hasn’t seen in twenty years.īookmark When a Woman Subways Each day, Sujin draws a line down her face. Special Section Bright Night After her divorce, which her husband asked for, astronomer Jiyeon takes a position at an astronomy department in Heeryeong, the small city where she used to live with her maternal grandmother when she was younger.
One Left, the first novel in her Comfort Woman series, has been published in English (University of Washington Press, 2020).įeatured Writer The Man Who Touches Waves Trying to see, She has received the Yi Sang Literary Award, Hyundae Literary Award, Daesan Literary Award, Heo Gyun Literary Award, and the Tong-ni Literature Prize. His critique that “the history of women is not a prop from an unseen past or a forgotten time but a shining legacy that younger generations can trust and lean on” leaves a lasting impression.įeatured Writer Interview with Kim Soom: From Girlhood to Old Age, From Seoul to Manchuria to Ussuriysk Kim Soom embarked on her literary career by winning back-to-back awards: the 1997 Daejon Ilbo Award for “On Slowness” and the 1998 Munhak Dongne New Writer’s Award for “Time in the Middle Ages.” Over a career spanning twenty-five years, she has published seven short story collections, and sixteen novels, most recently A Swallow’s Heart, Drifting Land, and Listening Time, all published in 2020. The literary critic Kim Yo-Sub delves into the significance behind this development. Lately, however, family narratives that give due consideration to the female genealogy have made their presence known. In Korean modern and contemporary fiction, male-oriented family narratives, symbolized by the noticeable absence of the father figure, were largely mainstream. Magazine Vol.55 Spring 2022 The Special Section in this Spring 2022 issue of KLN explores female genealogy.