Jeong You Jeong (1966 — ) is a South Korean writer. Actively drawing upon elements of genre literature such as mysteries, thrillers, and detective stories, she has written novels centered around the themes of humanity’s “free will” and “evil.” She is notable for primarily writing novels, an unusual decision given the predominance of short stories in Korean literature.
1. Life
Jeong You Jeong was born in Hampyeong, South Jeolla Province in 1966. Though she dreamed of becoming a writer from an early age, she instead went to nursing school because of her mother’s opposition and later became a nurse. Her mother passed away while she was working as a nurse and afterwards, she worked for nine years at the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service. At the age of 35, she quit her regular job and started to study and write novels. A rough draft of a novel that she posted online on a literature website received favorable reviews and was even published. This work was her first novel, Eleven-Year-Old Jeong-euni (열한 살 정은이, 2000). Even before she became famous as an author, she published two other novels.
At the suggestion of a editor-in-chief at a publishing house, Jeong You Jeong entered open competitions for novels several times, but was continuously unsuccessful. Motivated by the evaluation committee’s negative comment which stated, “Failing to even crawl, this author attempts to fly,” she resolved to re-learn writing from its foundations. She carefully read Stephen King’s novels, while also extensively reading and studying theories and texts on writing and composition techniques.
After failing open competitions for novels a total of eleven times, she finally won the 1st Segye Ilbo World Young Adult Literature Prize (《세계일보》세계청소년문학상) for her work, The Spring Camp of My Life (내 인생의 스프링 캠프, 2007), and made her debut as an official writer. Her second novel, Expose My Heart (내 심장을 쏴라, 2009) won the 5th Segye Ilbo World Literature Prize (《세계일보》세계문학상) while also cementing her status as a popular and beloved writer. Afterwards, she continuously published a series of novels, such as Seven Years of Darkness (7년의 밤, 2011), 28 (2014), The Good Son (종의 기원, 2016), and Jini, jini (진이, 지니, 2019). Among her works, Expose My Heart (내 심장을 쏴라, 2009) and Seven Years of Darkness (7년의 밤, 2011) were adapted into major commercial films.
2. Writing
The key themes that woven throughout Jeong You Jeong’s literature, which are close to the style of popular literature such as thrillers and mysteries, can be seen as “free will” and the “evils of humanity.”
The Spring Camp of My Life (내 인생의 스프링 캠프, 2007), Expose My Heart (내 심장을 쏴라, 2009), and Seven Years of Darkness (7년의 밤, 2011), which prominently depict a will to resist through escaping from the violence of the world and its systems, have collectively been called the “Free Will” trilogy. These works, while exposing the world’s cruelties, nevertheless depict the conditions of the people who live within them in a positive, occasionally even humorous, manner.
On the other hand, Seven Years of Darkness (7년의 밤, 2011), 28 (2014), and The Good Son (종의 기원, 2016) have together been deemed the so-called “The Evils of Humanity” Trilogy. Believing that “all humans contain both good and evil,” Jeong You Jeong has asserted that the work of investigating such desires aligns with the purpose of literature which seeks investigate humanity in general.
Within the long tradition of Korean literature’s tendency to divide literature into “pure” and “popular” literature, in which the former is greatly valued, Jeong You Jeong’s novels have been appraised as tearing down the boundary between these two categories and simultaneously achieving both popular interest and a literary degree of completion.
However, there are a considerable number of people who view Jeong You Jeong’s novels as merely “well-made” genre fiction that lacks a literary sensibility. Jeong You Jeong’s very existence, as an author that has been called “the author of absent criticism” for the low critical attention she has received in comparison to the public’s positive response, proves the reality that Korean literature, even in the 2010s, still intensely operates on a binary system of “pure” vs. “popular” literature.
