Park Taewon


Park Taewon was a modern South Korean writer who moved to North Korea.

Life

Park Taewon was born in Seoul, Korea on December 7, 1909. Park Taewon's pennames include Mongbo and Gubo. Park graduated from Gyeongseong Jeil High School, and entered Hosei University, Japan in 1930 but did not earn a degree. As a high school student, Park debuted as a poet when his poem “Elder Sister” won honorable mention in a contest sponsored by the journal Joseon Literary World ; and as a fiction writer in 1929 with the publication of his short story “The Beard” in New Life. Park joined the Group of Nine in 1930 and devoted himself to fiction thereafter. Upon Liberation in 1945 he became a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Korean Writers’ Alliance.
In 1950, Park crossed the 38th Parallel into North Korea where he wrote and worked as a professor at Pyeongyang Literature University. He was purged and prohibited from writing in 1956, but his writing privileges were reinstated in 1960.
Park died on July 10, 1986 in North Korea. His grandson, through a daughter he left in South Korea, is the movie director Bong Joon-ho.

Work

The Korea Literature Translation Institute describes Park's contributions to Korean modern literature:

Works in Translation

Novels
Short Stories