Ahn Soo-kil

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is a Korean name; the family name is Ahn.

Ahn Soo-kil

Hangul	안수길
Hanja	安壽吉
Revised Romanization	An Su-gil
McCune-Reischauer	An Sugil

Ahn Soo-kil (1911-1977) was a Korean novelist and journalist who devoted much of his life to depicting the lives of the Korean settlers in Jiandao, Manchuria. He was born on November 3, 1911 in Hamhŭng, Hamgyŏngnamdo, in present-day North Korea. Graduating from local schools, he attended Waseda University in Tokyo in the 1930s.

Ahn made his debut as an author with the publication of the short story "Director of Red Cross Hospital" (적십자병원장) in 1935. His first novella was Rice Plant, which was his first work to deal with Manchuria. He began to receive serious critical attention in 1959 with the publication of Northern Kando, an epic novel which covers four generations of a family's life in Jiandao from 1870 to 1945.

Ahn emigrated to the South after the liberation of Korea in 1945, and eventually became a professor of creative writing at Sorabol Art College in Seoul (this later became the Arts faculty of Chung-Ang University). He wrote short stories including "The Third Type of Man" (제3인간형) which told the story of city life during the Korean War.