Recipient of the 2025 Arts Council Korea Literature Fellowship
"The poet's dreams are permeated by their lover's warmth, by the memos written by their lover who searched for poetry before the poet wherever they went, I wish the poet's pouch of solitude would bulge like it contained the fist of the sacrificed, I wish the world would be crammed to bursting with poems that don't need to be understood, the letters carved into the air under our noses so they can't be missed." —Excerpt from "The Poet's Lover," in The Person I Will Live As (Changbi, 2015).
Kim Joong il is a poet who employs highly fantastical writing to lay bare realistic sorrows.
LTI Korea 
DLKL 
SIWF 