Recipient of the 2025 Arts Council Korea Literature Fellowship
A good poem conceals a knife inside./A knife can be used to stab an opponent, but also to cook for one's love./ It may be used for knife dancing and divination./Life stabbed my side, so I will give birth to you through that hole. God gave me a knife, so I will dance with it. —Huh Eunsil, "My Poems, My Poetry" (Lyric Poetry & Poetics, Spring 2023)
1. Life
Huh Eunsil was born in Hongcheon, Gangwon, in 1975. Growing up in the countryside until her mid-teens contributed to the poet's signature affinity for traditional Korean vocabulary and shamanism/animism. Huh studied Korean language and literature at university. Before she became a poet, she wrote for KBS and MBC radio, working on current affairs and culture programming. This experience as a current affairs writer sparked Huh's interest in social and historical issues, inspiring her to use her poetry as a platform for voices dismissed by history and omitted from documentation. Making her literary debut in 2010 winning the Silcheon Munhak (Literature and Practice) New Writer's Award, Huh continued writing for radio along with her poetry before becoming a full-time poet. Since moving to Jeju in 2018, she has devoted herself to capturing the universal values inherent in the island's unique history and culture, ranging from the April 3rdUprisingtohaenyeoandsimbang.
2. Writing
Huh Eunsil is a modern poet whose work falls within the tradition of classic Korean lyrical poetry, yet it would be difficult to pin down the poet characterized by her "spontaneous imagination and limber voice" (poet Kim Min-jeong) to a single kind of poetry. While Huh carries on the torch of Korean feminist poetry with her work written from "the abdomen of a woman who has witnessed lost souls flapping about like so much laundry in the mortal world" (poet Kang Jeong), the subject range covered by her feminist language language ranges from existential questions to humanitarian issues such as the climate crisis and war.
Lauded for "expressing the sadness of extinction in "homegrown language" (judge's commentary for the 8thKimKu-yongPoetryAward),Huhdepictsthefundamentalanguishofmankindinrefinedpoeticlanguage.Theshaman'svoicerepresentinganguishundervariousexistential,social,andhistoricconditionsconstantlygroundsherpoems.
These characteristics become more pronounced or altered with the poet's relocation to Jeju in 2018. Through her series of poems addressing the April 3rdMassacre(Voices of Memories, Recovery), the poet approaches generational suffering and trauma while continuing the poetic question of what is humanity. She continuously strives to write about universal issues such as women, labor, the environment, and war in aesthetic language.
The critic Sunwoo Eun-sil dubs this "writing poems about the deaths of others as a living person" as a "writing of becoming." In other words, the poet actively "becomes" the other in her poetry, be that "other" be the dead, nature, or even an object. The critic Kwak Hyoungduck also espouses a similar point of view, describing Huh's writing as "not reenacting but going inside the pain of others rendered invisible by history/life."
Reference
1) Poetry
For a Little While I’m Sad 나는 잠깐 설웁다(Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 문학동네, 2017)
Recovery 회복기(Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 문학동네, 2022)
We Were All the MV Sewol 우리 모두가 세월호였다 (Co-author, Silcheon Munhak 실천문학, 2014)
Voices of Memories 기억의 목소리(Co-author, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 문학동네, 2021)
The Flame That Became a Butterfly 나비가 된 불꽃 (Co-author, Samchang 삶이보이는창, 2023)
2) Essays
I’m a Book That Opens Only to You 나는, 당신에게만 열리는 책(Yedam Publishing Co. 예담, 2014)
Because You Talked to Me That Day 그날 당신이 내게 말을 걸어서(Wisdom House위즈덤하우스, 2019)
Diary Written Tomorrow 내일 쓰는 일기(Changbi Publishers, Inc. 창비, 2019)
Dazed Not Dazzling 영롱보다 몽롱(Co-author, Eulyoo Publishing 을유문화사, 2022)
3) Reference
Kang Jeong, "The Body That Swallowed a Snake," For a Little While I’m Sad. Munhakdongne Publishing Corp., 2017.
강정, <뱀을 삼킨 몸> 나는 잠깐 설웁다, 문학동네, 2017.
Sunwoo Eun-sil, "Record of Sadness," Recovery. Munhakdongne Publishing Corp., 2022.
선우은실, <설움 기록>, 회복기, 문학동네, 2022.
Kwak Hyoungduck, "Literature Living the Pain of Others," Baekjo. Nojak Literature House, 2023.
곽형덕, <타인의 고통을 살아가는 문학>, 백조, 노작홍사용문학관, 2023.
Profile information provided by the Arts Council Korea (ARKO)
LTI Korea 
DLKL 
SIWF 