Books set in South Korea

About the literature of South Korea

Han Kang, author of The Vegetarian, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024, the first writer from South Korea to do so. Classical Chinese long dominated formal writing before the alphabet hangul appeared in the fifteenth century, while pansori, a form of sung storytelling, carried tales such as Chunhyangga aloud. Japanese colonial rule, war and swift modernisation mark twentieth-century fiction, and much of it remains untranslated into English.

Yi Munyol's Our Twisted Hero, translated from Korean, is a school story, set around 1960, showing how authoritarian power and conformity operate in a provincial classroom. Min Jin Lee's Pachinko opens in a Busan fishing village under Japanese colonial rule before moving to Japan. Peter H. Lee's anthology Flowers of Fire gathers twentieth-century stories of colonial rule, war and rapid modernisation. Lisa See's The Island of Sea Women portrays two women divers on Jeju Island across decades.