The Prisoner: A Memoir (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781839760839)

A sweeping account of imprisonment--in time, in language, and in a divided country--from Korea's most acclaimed novelist

In 1993, writer and democracy activist Hwang Sok-yong was sentenced to five years in the Seoul Detention Center upon his return to South Korea from North Korea, the country he had fled with his family as a child at the start of the Korean War. Already a dissident writer well-known for his part in the democracy movement of the 1980s, Hwang's imprisonment forced him to consider the many prisons to which he was subject--of thought, of writing, of Cold War nations, of the heart.

In this capacious memoir, Hwang moves between his imprisonment and his life--as a boy in Pyongyang, as a young activist protesting South Korea's military dictatorships, as a soldier in the Vietnam War, as a dissident writer first traveling abroad--and in so doing, narrates the dramatic revolutions and transformations of one life and of Korean society during the twentieth century.

Author: Hwang Sok-Yong
ISBN-10: 1839760834
ISBN-13: 9781839760839
Publisher: Verso
Language: English
Published: 08/03/2021
Pages: 624
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.63lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.00w x 1.70d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/05/2021
Foreword 06/26/2021
Kirkus Reviews 07/15/2021