Recipient of the 2025 Arts Council Korea Literature Fellowship
"To fly a kite/I need a long landing strip" —Excerpt from "How to Fly," inHow to Fly(Munhakdongne, 2017)
Kim Joon-hyun is a poet, children's poet, novelist, and literary critic.
1. Life
Kim Joon-hyun was born in Pohang, Gyeongbuk, in 1987. As a teenager he immersed himself in the works of Han Kang and Lee Seung-U. At university, he became interested in exploring the world through poetry under the influence of his mentor, the critic Kim Moon-ju. Kim made lis literary debut as a poet in 2013 winning the Seoul Shinmun New Writer’s Contest; as a children's poet in 2017 winning the Changbi Prize for New Figures in Children’s Literature; as a critic in 2020 winning the Newcomer's Award from Korean Modern Poetry; and as a novelist winning the Dong-a Ilbo New Writer's Contest. Since the 2020s he has devoted himself to teaching and critiquing children's poetry as well as writing it, as well as serving as editor for the bimonthly Children's Poetry.
2. Writing
Kim Joon-hyun's first poetry collection, Writing in White, sets forward a world divided into the opposing, non-communal pairs of black/white, writing/paper.
Like an architect or a go (baduk) player, or an artificial machine, he creates his own aesthetic (artificial) world. Kim's poems are far removed from what might be defined as humanistic values. They show a distinct lack of positive interest in human emotions, senses, points of view, ethics, and institutions. His work, in this sense, excludes human empathy to the minimum. This unfeeling, non-sensory, inhuman position has to be one of the most unusual in 2010s Korean poetry. Kim's poetic direction is trained on the nonhuman, demi-human, post-human. The moniker Earth-Heptapod springs from here.
As for Kim Joon-hyun the children's poet, his progressiveness lies in remaking the old and familiar into something new, as evinced in his poetry collection How to Fly that rejects the tidy convention of poetic language, writing children's poems as part of an experimental and disruptive impulse, a question and study of the genre. Five years after the publication of his first collection that was praised by Ahn Do-Hyun as "making us reconsider what we believed to be children's poetry," Kim's second collection of children's poetry, How to Choose Good Tomatoes, presents itself as a work independent of its predecessor. While indebted in terms of subject material and inspiration to his previous work, the new poems of How to Choose Good Tomatoes effortlessly include and surpass the old, bringing the reader to a new familiar/unfamiliar world that sets the new standard for children's poetry in the 2020s.
Reference
<작품 목록>
Children's Poetry
How to Fly 나는 법(Munhakdongne Publishing Corp., 문학동네, 2017)
How to Choose Good Tomatoes 토마토 기준(Munhakdongne Publishing Corp., 문학동네, 2022)
Poetry
Writing in White 흰 글씨로 쓰는 것(Minumsa Publishing Group 민음사, 2017)
Souls Kissing Subtitles 자막과 입을 맞추는 영혼(Minumsa Publishing Group 민음사, 2022)
YA Poetry
I Wish It Would Rain Until the World Grew Softer 세상이 연해질 때까지 비가 왔으면 좋겠어(Changbi Edu 창비교육, 2022)
2023 24thYoungCritic'sAwardAnthology2023년 제24회 젊은평론가상 수상작품집(Co-author, Youkrack Books 역락, 2023)
<참고문헌>
Im Jiyeon, "Creator of Artificial Languages: Records of the Earth-Heptapod's Cold-Hearted World," in Writing in White(Minumsa, 2017).
임지연,<인공 언어 제작자, 지구-헵타포드의 비정한 세계의 기록>(흰 글씨로 쓰는 것 민음사, 2017)
Kim Ryung, "Fighting with Air: The State of Korean Children’s Poetry in 2020," in Don’t Eat the Poems on the Cat’s Whiskers(Munhakdongne, 2021).
김륭, <공기와 다투다-2020년, 우리 동시 어디까지 왔나>(고양이 수염에 붙은 시는 먹지 마세요 문학동네, 2021)
Lee Ahn, "Tickling the Belly Button of the Cold and Indifferent World: On Kim Joon-Hyun’s How to Fly," (Joy That Comes Slowly, Munhakdongne, 2023)
이안, <단단하고 차가운 세계의 배꼽에 간지럼을-김준현 동시집 『나는 법』이야기(천천히 오는 기쁨 문학동네, 2023)
Profile information provided by the Arts Council Korea (ARKO)
LTI Korea 
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