A short life of the author
Shin Kyung-sook (born 1963) is one of South Korea’s most widely read and internationally celebrated novelists. Her novel Please Look After Mom (2008) became a million-copy bestseller in Korea, was translated into dozens of languages, and proved that Korean literary fiction could achieve global mainstream success — paving the way for the international Korean literature boom that followed.
Life and Career
Shin grew up in a rural area and moved to Seoul as a teenager to work in a factory while attending night school, an experience that shaped her understanding of the class tensions and emotional displacements at the heart of Korean modernization. She studied creative writing at Seoul Institute of the Arts and began publishing fiction in the mid-1980s.
Her early novels and stories won major Korean literary prizes and established her as one of the country’s most popular literary writers. A Lone Room (1995) and The Train Leaves at Seven (1999) explored loneliness, memory, and the textures of urban life.
Please Look After Mom (엄마를 부탁해, 2008) was her breakthrough — a novel about a family searching for their elderly mother, who has gone missing at Seoul Station. Narrated in alternating perspectives (including second person), the novel worked as both a mystery and a meditation on the emotional debts children owe their parents. Its emotional directness resonated across cultures, and it became one of the best-selling translated novels in the United States in 2011.
I’ll Be Right There (2010) was set during the political upheavals of 1980s Korea. The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (2013) was a semi-autobiographical novel about a young woman working in a factory — drawing directly on Shin’s own youth.
In 2015, Shin was involved in a plagiarism controversy when passages of her work were found to echo those of Yukio Mishima. She publicly apologized and temporarily withdrew from public life.
Key Works
- Please Look After Mom (2008)
- I’ll Be Right There (2010)
- The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (2013)
Collecting Shin
Korean first editions (Changbi) are published in large runs. English translations (Knopf, Other Press) bring $15–$30. Please Look After Mom signed first edition (Knopf, 2011) is the most collected title. Shin’s importance in Korean literary history is significant regardless of the plagiarism controversy, and her work remains widely taught and collected.