Hwang Sun-won

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Hwang Sun-won
Hangul:	황순원
Hanja:	黃順元
Revised Romanization:	Hwang Sun-won
McCune-Reischauer:	Hwang Sunwŏn

Hwang Sun-wŏn (1915 - 2000), was a Korean novelist and poet. He was born in Taedong, South Pyongan, in modern-day North Korea; however, following the division of Korea he lived in the South, becoming a professor at Kyunghee University.

Although he wrote many volumes of poetry and eight novels, Hwang achieved his greatest acclaim as the author of short fiction, which was regarded as the premiere literary genre through most of the twentieth century in Korea. Hwang is the author of some of the best-known stories in the modern Korean literary canon, including “Stars” (1940), “Old Man Hwang” (1942), “The Old Potter” (1944), “Cloudburst” (1952), and “Cranes” (1953). Hwang began writing novels in the 1950s, his most successful being Trees on a Slope (1960), which depicts the lives of three soldiers during the Korean War. Sunlight, Moonlight (1962-65) depicts the lives of members of the former untouchable class in urban Seoul. The Moving Castle (1968-72) depicts the complex and problematic synthesis of Western and indigenous cultures in rapidly-modernizing Korea. It is also one of the few depictions in fiction of gender roles in Korean shamanism.