*Ranked No.1 in the category of fiction/No. 2 in overall category

*Eun Heekyung’s first full-length novel in eight years Face to face with a memory you have

*Fifteen years in the making from beginning to completion…a contrite look back on an authoritarian society, rampant sexism, and resigned life. - Chosun Daily

*A statement of repentance by someone who evaded the times. -JoongAng Daily

*The bright and penetrating light where the youth remained, the complexity of memory and rehashing is dealt with by way of a novelistic mechanism. -Hankyoreh Daily

*There is no nostalgia or idealization involved in Eun Heekyung’s way of looking at the past. - Gyeonghwang Daily

*A novel that intersects 1977 and 2017. The distortion of memory, disguised desires, fallacy of self-defense, and evasion of duty are intricately interwoven in Eun Hui- gyeong’s literary net—and it is almost impossible to breathe when one gets to the latter half of the novel. Thumbs up to her. - Maeil Economics Daily

Eun Heekyung has won many major Korean literary awards, such as those of Munhakdongne, Dongseo, Yi Sang, Korean Novel, The Korea Times, Dongin and Hwangsunwon. She has now written a new novel, The Light’s Past, of which she laboriously worked on it for seven years after completing her last book, Composed Life, which was published in 2012

The book begins in 2017 with the story of the protagonist, “me,” and her old friend, “her.” The protagonist met “her,” the novelist, forty years ago in 1977 at a dormitory of a woman’s college. The protagonist had always been self-conscious about her stammering, which had shaped her into a non-committal and unassertive personality, while she felt comfortable with her friend’s self-centered, direct, and both inferior and superior attitude. Her friend had published a book, entitled For the Princesses Who Are No Longer There, recounting their dormitory days. Although the protagonist had known her for many years, she did not get to read the book until much later and found out that their memories of the shared time were completely different.

The author delineates the world of “difference” and “integration” that the young women, who have come of age, encounter in a new milieu called the dormitory. The literary critic, Shin Hyeong-cheol, stated in his introduction that Eun Heekyung’s book does not let the readers down—no matter what their expectations were; be it the detailed description of the culture of that era, and fluid and apt writing or her truthful observation of women’s experience that is sharply captured. The author presents a scrupulous visage of Korean culture in 1970s through the female students sharing communal space in a college dormitory. It was during a time when “Virtuosity, Hard Work, and Chastity” were the motto for these women from the provinces who began living in Seoul for the first time.

Above all, what stands out is the straightforward confessions of a person as she comes face to face with her naked self, who has used evasion as a shield against life. She does this by traveling back and forth in time. “A person with a weakness has an extra antenna for the world.” The author’s meticulously crafted writing discloses the universal problematic of an individual in life, which will mirror the reader as well. That is how “the stories of that period” filters through a writer called Eun Heekyung to become “my story” for everyone.