Chang Kang-myoung is a South Korean writer. He was born in 1975 in Seoul. He graduated from Yonsei University in urban engineering and worked in a construction company, which he quit. Then he entered Dong-A Daily and worked as a reporter for 11 years. He began his career as a writer when he was awarded the Hankyoreh Literary Award for his novel The Bleached (표백) in 2011. He received the Surim Literary Award in 2014 for his novel Yeolgwanggeumji, ebarodeu (열광금지, 에바로드, No Enthusiasm, Eva Road); he received the Jeju 4·3 Peace Prize for his novel Daetgeulbudae(댓글부대 The Comments Army) in 2015; and he received the Munhakdongne Writer Award for Geumeum, ttoneun dangsini segyereul gieokhaneun bangsik(그믐, 또는 당신이 세계를 기억하는 방식 Waning Crescent, or the Way You Remember the World). He has also written novels Homodominanseu (호모도미난스 Homodominance),Hanguki sileoseo (한국이 싫어서 Because I Don’t Like Korea), and a short story collectionLumière People (뤼미에르 피플). He received the ‘Today’s Writer Award’ in 2016 for Daetgeulbudae (댓글부대 The Comments Army).
1. Life
Chang Kang-myoung became well known due to the fact that he has won multiple literary awards run through submissions from aspiring authors. On this, Chang Kang-myoung has said the following. “Before debut I won 4 literary awards, and I had a very clear reason to submit. The year before last year, I quit my job, wrote a manuscript and sent it to various publishers. But most didn’t reply, and they didn’t take my manuscript either. However, fortunately not long after, the submission I had made to the Surim Literary Award became selected. And naively, I thought ‘now publishers will contact me’. But still, there was no word from them. So I was looking ahead toward the publication of Surim Literary Award Winner Collection, and then by chance the publication date of that coincided with the publication of Homodominanseu (호모도미난스 Homodominance) from EunHaengNamu. EunHaengNaMu asked if the publication of the Surim Literary Award Winner could be delayed, but later we just decided to publish both. EunHaengNaMu and I both thought that Homodominanseu (호모도미난스 Homodominance), which is a genre fiction, would be more successful than the work that won the Surim Literary Award, which was a bildungsroman. However, unlike the Surim Literary Award Winner, Homodominanseu (호모도미난스 Homodominance) from EunHaengNaMu was just not selling. The editor in chief of EunHaengNaMu said that “because there are so many literary awards these days, it seems that if it didn’t win anything, readers don’t even look at the cover.” So the editor in chief suggested that I submit a manuscript to a new literary award being launched by EunHaengNaMu. But, because I already published a work from EunHaengNaMu, I didn’t apply there. Later during the Surim Literary Award ceremony after party, one judge said the following. “It’s hard to say that you are known to the public, so you should try winning more awards.” I was thinking the same thing. It wasn’t that even if I did win awards, someone was going to request a manuscript from me. So afterwards, instead of submitting to publishers, I sent manuscripts only to literary awards. But even when I won another award, the situation didn’t change, and even when I won the Jeju 4·3 Peace Prize my level of popularity was the same. After the fourth award, readers began to recognize my name.” As it can be seen from Chang Kang-myoung’s statements, it is now the age where readers must reach the audience themselves. From such a view, Chang Kang-myoung can be seen as a self-made writer of our time.
2. Writing
One thing that must be mentioned when talking about Chang Kang-myoung’s fiction is his long experience as a reporter. It has been said that “in Korean society, daily reporters receive the most rigorous training in writing. In order to learn how to confirm the truth, for 3 to 4 months they sleep only a few hours and live like beggars, panhandling for news at police stations. It’s common to get all kinds of creative curses from senior journalists just to finish one sentence. And after a month or two like that, they can write a certain amount of words within the deadline no matter what happens.” Though there is some exaggeration, as the quote about writing training that reporters go through tells, Chang Kang-myoung learned how to quickly write based on facts. However, literature and news are different, so this alone isn’t what is enabling fiction writing. So how does Chang Kang-myoung write fiction?<
Critic Seo Hui-won has written as following. “How does Chang Kang-myoung overcome the gap between the literary styles of fiction and news? To answer this simply, Chang Kang-myoung restores the relationships and the experiences of people faintly engraved in concisely written news articles in the form where various related events are shut off, and germinating the story within. However, it can’t be said that Chang Kang-myoung is creating novels, as read in significant meaning by Benyamin. The novel, which is based on the traditions of realism, as it was in early 20th century, it still doesn’t have competitiveness as a product in the Korean literary market of the 2010s. Instead, what is more preferred by people who are going through the general changes of the mobile environment founded in the Internet, is Chang Kang-myoung’s journalistic style of writing, resulting from his “rigorous training”. The nonchalant public armed with smartphones and connected to the world, read tens to hundreds of articles a day, and they are consuming news very quickly. To readers who are used to such reading environment, the book is not really a familiar nor useful medium. The writing in novels are ambiguous, have various meanings, and attempt to infuse information into the writer’s mind in order to change them into experiences of characters, and in return attempts to substitute them as meaningful time for readers. This is either too difficult to read, or it is just a succession of insufferable sentences that only bring boredom. In the case of Chang Kang-myoung, he writes his books by putting the journalistic style of writing at the forefront (such as Yeolgwanggeumji, ebarodeu (열광금지, 에바로드, No Enthusiasm, Eva Road) and Hanguki sileoseo (한국이 싫어서 Because I Don’t Like Korea)), or by strongly sequencing narrative elements that give genre specific interests on top of familiar literary styles (such as Lumière People (뤼미에르 피플) and Homodominanseu (호모도미난스 Homodominance), as well as putting the narrative together in a form of collage through various styles, such as declarations, biographies, reports, interviews, news articles, journals, and fiction (such as The Bleached (표백)).” This is an opinion that can be references for Chang Kang-myoung’s writing.
