Considered Korea's most accomplished contemporary writer of short fiction, Hwang Sun-won is a prolific writer of novels, short stories and poetry. He was born in North Korea in 1915 and educated there and in Tokyo. He and his family moved to South Korea in 1946 where he taught Korean literature in Seoul. Critics commend his command of dialect, his ability to portray different settings and his adeptness with different forms of narrative and characterisation.

As a student of Sungshil High School Hwang Sun-won published in the Tonggwang in 1931 his poems, including My Dream and Don't Be Afraid, My Son, and entered upon a long literary career. Having joined a dramatic movement in Tokyo in 1934, he began to publish both poems and fictions at the end of the 1930’s.

His first fictional work, An Adverb on the Street, which portrays the joys and sorrows of a Korean student studying in Japan, illustrates the underlying tone of his short stories in general, that is, a sort of lyrical pathos. Having published his first collection of short stories, The Swamp, in 1940, he consolidated his position as a lyrical short story writer with The Stars and The Shade. Far from being descriptive of the harsh realities of life, his earlier works manifest a yearning for the lost childhood and the fairyland. While The Swamp traces the initiatory process of a girl who becomes awakened to the adult world and its secrets, The Stars describes the inner world of a boy persistently searching for his dead mother’s image. In A Sudden Shower, published a little later than the above two and depicting a sad experience of a boy and a girl at puberty who become sexually awakened, the author highlights the emotional agony that all the growing boys and girls undergo in common.

After the liberation of Korea in 1945, he published his first novel Living with the Stars along with a short story, A Dog in Moknomi Village. The novel gives a vivid picture of the social aspects of the period from the liberation to the Korean War in 1950. In Cain's Descendants the love between a falling landowner’s son and a tenant farmer’s daughter grows with the legend of a big baby rock for a background but comes to a tragic end in the midst of the confused state of the times. The author attacks the land reform policy enforced in the North Korea and the inhumanities of Communism. Readers can sense here his steadfastness in hating violence and brutality, in denying injustices, and in believing in the pure and the beautiful. Crane also emphasizes that even war calamities and ideologies cannot destroy human nature and brotherhood.

Trees on the Cliff, a treatment of the healing process of the war-wounded youths, affords a proof that the author also has become more or less free from his injured consciousness. Having demonstrated his worship for life with this novel, he turns his concerns toward the inherent wandering impulses of man.

The Sun and the Moon and A Moving Castle approach in real earnest the problems of the value systems of the Koreans, their roots, their wandering impulses, and their religious mentality which can fuse Christianity into their shamanism. Whether he attacks openly the corruption of the traditional ways of life and value systems in the urbanizing process or fixes his eyes on the realities with a critical mind as is shown in Interpretations of the Numbers and Being Late This Day published after the 1970’s, he always preserves his warm and sympathetic attitude toward his subjects and transforms them into beautiful artifacts. In short, though often inclined to be romantic and mystical, his works with their intricate and well-made structure attain rare compactness and beauty.

• http://www.sogang.ac.kr/~anthony/klt/96fall/hwangsunwon.htm
• http://www.aks.ac.kr/icc/panels/Fulton.doc