Han Yujoo debuted in 2003 by winning the Literature and Society’s New Writers Award for the short story “To the Moon.” She won the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award in 2009. She has authored the short story collections To the Moon, Book of Ice, and My Left Hand the King and My Right Hand the King’s Scribe, and the novel The Impossible Fairy Tale, which has been translated into English and French. She is also a noted translator, whose works include translations of Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table, and Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful and The Ongoing Moment, among others, into Korean. She is an active member of an experimental group called Rue and also runs Oulipopress, an independent publisher.
1. Life
Han Yujoo was born in 1982 in Seoul, South Korea. After graduating Dongdaejeon High School, she studied German language and literature at Hongik University and completed graduate-level coursework in Aesthetics at Seoul National University.
She began her writing career almost by chance. In her final year of high school, she submitted three or four applications to undergraduate programs, including Russian literature, that she supposed would allow her to read as much as possible. She finally chose to enroll in a German literature program. She read extensively, as she had expected, and her university life remained largely uneventful until she took an elective course in creative writing offered by the Korean literature department at her school. Without harboring literary ambitions anywhere as strong as the creative writing majors in her class, she wrote a short story entitled “Dalo” (달로 To the Moon) for her final project. She showed the story to a friend interested in literature, who encouraged her to send in the story to writing contests. She submitted it to a contest held by the literary journal Literature and Society and won, which officially marked her literary debut. She pursued her master’s degree in her mid-twenties, during which she stayed in Paris for around five months.
Currently, she writes, translates, and teaches at a university. She is a member of Ru, an experimental writers’ association, and is the founder of the publisher Oulipopress. She was briefly a member of the band The Chop, along with poets Kiwan Sung and Hwang Byungsng. In an interview at the 2016 Seoul International Writers’ Festival, Han stated that her involvement with the band was so long ago she barely remembered it, and that she only participated in two shows. She did recall bringing an instrument she was not yet familiar with and performing poorly, having only agreed to perform because a literary colleague had reached out to her in need of a session musician.
In 2008 and 2012, she was funded by LTI Korea to partake in the Overseas Residency Program for Korean Writers in New York and Provence, respectively. In 2013, she joined the Artience Residency offered by Arts Council Korea.
2. Writing
Unlike some writers who receive critical and popular acclaim due to their exceptional narrative or character development, Han Yujoo intentionally veers away from standard practices in fiction writing and succeeds in creating a unique literary voice. Her work holds appeal for some readers and critics because she refuses to craft a meticulously structured narrative and does not attempt to produce memorable scenes through characters or events. In a favorable review of Han’s experimental style, literary critic Hwang Ho-deok writes:
“But can there be a writer who does not want to write? Such a person is probably not a writer at all. Then what about writers who want to write about not writing? To tell a story about not telling one? There are some, if not many, writers like that right now. They write about action with no action, all the while attempting to erase even that writing itself. They jest that they deny their own being (and their writing); they have decided to become nothing. They are skeptical of the narrative, the message, and even meaning. The ‘first to realize the futility of language,’ they are the ones giving today’s Korean literature a ‘devastating brilliance.’”
Han’s work has also received negative reviews. Some critics argue that her language is superfluous, her experiments derivative, and her works closer to miscellanies of essays rather than novels. It can be argued that Han Yujoo stands on the boundaries of linguistic experimentation that Korean literature is undergoing in the 21st century.
Reference
“The Antidote to Plot: Novelist Han Yujoo.” Munjang, last modified April 6 2012,
http://webzine.munjang.or.kr/archives/4034.
“From Corner to Corner: Han Yujoo.” SNU Press, last modified March 31 2012,
http://www.snunews.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=11496.
“Interview with Participating Writer Han Yujoo.” Seoul International Writers’ Festival, last modified January 7 2016,
http://siwf.klti.or.kr/bbs/board.php?bo_table=C01&wr_id=17.
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