Gu Byeong-mo(1976-) is a Korean novelist. Since debuting in 2009 with her young adult fiction novel Wizard Bakery(위저드 베이커리), she has received popular acclaim. Despite debuting in the genre of young adult fiction, her works have successfully branched out beyond the genre of young adult fiction.
1. Life
Gu Byeong-mo was born in 1976 in Seoul. She was interested in reading from an early age and read a wide range of books. In junior high, she would borrow books from her wealthy friends and read the cheap “pocket books” that he sister brought home. She even read Hermann Hesse’s Demian until the cover began to fall off. In her last year of high school, Gu entered a literature contest hosted by a newspaper but did not win. She graduated from the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Kyung Hee University and worked as a editor at a publishing company under she debuted in 2009 by winning the Changbi Award for Young Adult Fiction with her book Wizard Bakery (위저드 베이커리, 2009).
She is a prolific author who publishes more than one book a year. She is also eclectic in the way she moves back and forth between the genres of young adult fiction, generic fiction, genre fiction, and literary fiction. Her short story collections include Not by Design (고의는 아니지만, 2011), As Long as It’s Not Me (그것이 나만은 아니기를, 2015), and Just one Sentence (단 하나의 문장, 2018). She has published the full-length novels The Boy with Gills (아가미, 2011), The Children of Pygmalion (피그말리온 아이들, 2012), Bruised Fruit (파과, 2013), and One Spoon of Time (한 스푼의 시간, 2016).
In person she is shy and reserved, and she tends to avoid meeting people. She says she believes meeting people through books is enough. She also says she tries her best to create books that are not beholded to one genre, style, or method, and which can reach her readers.
2. Writing
Gu Byeong-mo is known as an author that moves freely between the genre and techniques of fantasy and the style of traditional realism. Throughout her career, she has either depicted the fantasies of daily life or intermixed fantasy with daily life. Her light-hearted fantasy stories, in which magicians appear, people transform, and time runs backwards, also carry the shocking weight of issues like incest, child abuse, and filicide.
More than just works that exist in a world apart from reality, Gu’s novels are closer to works of fantasy that are intricately linked to our reality. Some have even said that her works are “both works of fantasy and realism.” To Gu Byeong-mo, fantasy is not a technique restricted to just one specific genre; rather, it is an effective literary weapon for solving the problems of reality. Because of this, Gu’s novels have many scenes in which the gloomy nature of reality is candidly depicted through fantastical elements or techniques. Prime examples are “Jojanggi” (조장기), a story about eating people in despair, and “A Lullaby” (어떤 자장가), a story about a poor working mother who works part-time writing papers for students and who has sadistic daydreams about putting her sleepless child in a running laundry machine. For Gu Byeong-mo, fantasy is both based on reality and a more candid avenue for exploring reality than reality itself.
The majority of the characters in Gu Byeong-mo’s novels exist in some sort of state of disaster. A young boy who meets a magical cookie that will erase the memory of running away from home, the violence of his stepmother, the indifference of his father (Wizard Bakery, 2009); a half-human, half-fish man who is thrown into a lake and saved by his gills (The Boy with Gills, 2011); and grandmother who is also an assassin for hire and a flawless killing machine (Bruised Fruit, 2013)—her novels evoke not daydreaming fantasies, but the threat and fear of reality, of here and now.
There are three striking characteristics of how she deals with disasters. First, disaster always comes not as a scary monster, but as an everyday happening. Second, disasters affect people “relatively” according to structures that have already been created. And third, people who are the target of disasters have nowhere to escape. Gu Byeong-mo criticizes people who both criticize others and sympathize with others while wishing they are not the only ones suffering from commonplace disasters. And this criticism is well illustrated in the books Just one Sentence (단 하나의 문장, 2018) and book A Story Embroidered onto the Heart (심장에 수놓은 이야기, 2020).
Gu Byeong-mo’s first work, Wizard Bakery, was a popular success and sold more than 400,000 copies. She also received recognition as a literary author by winning the Today’s Writer Award with the her book As Long as It’s Not Me (그것이 나만은 아니기를, 2015). Her novels, which skillfully intermingle elements of reality and fantasy, have been praised for thoughtfully reflecting the dangers inherent in daily life through nondaily situations. Gu Byeong-mo writes a wide spectrum of literature that can be enjoyed by adults and young adults alike and is pioneering her own genre on the boundaries.
