Kung-Sook Shin

Shin Kyung-Sook (as her name would appear in Korean, with the family name first) was born in 1963 in a small South Korean farming village. Like the parents in her novel, her parents were farmers who couldn't afford to send her to school, so like the writer-daughter in the novel, she went to live with her older brother in Seoul. She worked in an electronics plant while she attended night school. Her first novel was published in 1985, and she is widely read in Korea and parts of Europe. In 1995, her novel A Lone Room received Korea's Manhae Prize, and in 2009 it received France's Prix de l'Inaperçu (prize for the unnoticed/underappreciated) award. It has been translated into English by the American PEN Center, but  hasn't found a publisher. It tells the story of "an intellectually ambitious young girl struggling to survive as a sweatshop worker in the 1970s." Her most recent novel, the one we are reading, Please Look After Mom, is the work that has brought her broad international recognition. For this work, in 2011, she became the first woman to receive the Man Asian Literary Prize. Below is a YouTube clip of her award acceptance. She speaks in Korean, and her speech is translated to English by a translator.

Here is a 2-part interview posted in the blog of a student of Korean literature at Columbia University.

Part 1 and Part 2.