25.01.1952–?
Hwang Ji-u
Hwang Ji-u was born in 1952 in Haenam County in southern Korea and studied aesthetics and philosophy. In 1980 he made his debut with poems in a newspaper literary contest, and three years later he published his first collection, “Birds Also Leave the World”. He wrote poetry and plays, taught creative writing and received a number of major national prizes.
Biography
In 1980 a poem called “Chronicle” was recognised in a literary contest run by the newspaper JoongAng Ilbo. The author was twenty-eight, and by then he had studied, served in the army against his will and returned to his courses.
Hwang Ji-u was born on 25 January 1952 in Haenam County, at the southernmost tip of the Korean Peninsula, in South Jeolla Province. His birth name was Hwang Jae-u. He spent his childhood in Gwangju: the family moved there in 1955, and he finished primary school, middle school and high school there. As a teenager he read the world literature series published by Jeongeumsa, and from those years, by his own account, he felt drawn to literature more than to anything else. His older brother, a teacher, became a Buddhist monk at Seonamsa temple. From 1972 Hwang studied in the Department of Aesthetics at Seoul National University and joined the university’s literary circle. In 1973 he took part in demonstrations against the military regime of Park Chung-hee and was forcibly drafted into the army. He was able to return to his studies only in 1976. Later he took a master’s degree in philosophy at Sogang University and completed the doctoral coursework in aesthetics at Hongik University.
In spring 1980 the JoongAng Ilbo published his poem, and afterwards his poems appeared in the journal Literature and Intellect (Munhakgwa jiseong). In May of that year the Gwangju Uprising broke out and was put down by the army. Hwang was among those who spread the news of what had happened in Seoul, despite a ban. He was expelled from the university and arrested; according to some accounts, he went through imprisonment and torture. I do not know the details, and I will not try to reconstruct them.
His first collection, “Birds Also Leave the World”, appeared in 1983 and brought him the Kim Suyeong Literary Award. In the same year he received the Sowol Poetry Prize. Next came “From Winter Trees to Spring Trees” (1985), “I Am You” (1987), “Lotus in the Eye of the Crab” (1990 or 1991, the sources differ) and “One Day I Will Sit in a Dimly-Lit Bar” (1998 or 1999). In 1995 a “sculptural book of poems”, “The Sea That Shines at Dusk”, was published. In his political poems Hwang used coded symbolism and satire; critics note in them a combination of the coarse and the delicate, of sensual lyrical description and anxiety about reality.
He also wrote for the theatre: his play “The Bride of May” was published in 2000. He taught creative writing at Hanshin University, then became a professor in the Department of Playwriting at the School of Drama of the Korea National University of Arts. His poems have been translated into German, English, French, Spanish and Mongolian; the German volume “Die Schatten der Fische” came out in 2006, and the English anthology “Even Birds Leave the World” in the same year.
His awards include the Contemporary Literature Award, the Sowol Poetry Prize (1993), the Baeksok Literary Award and the Daesan Literary Award (1999), and the Okgwan Order of Cultural Merit (2006).
Profile notes