Hwang Sok-yong

Hwang Sok-yong was born in Japanese-occupied Manchuria to Korean parents who returned home after liberation, and later served in the Vietnam War with South Korean forces, an experience that fed his early novel The Shadow of Arms. He became a prominent labor and democracy activist through the 1970s and 80s under South Korea's military governments.

In 1989 he made an unauthorized visit to North Korea to promote cultural exchange between the two Koreas, a trip that led first to years of exile in Germany and the United States and then, when he returned to South Korea in 1993, to five years in prison for violating national security law. He was released by presidential pardon in 1998.

The Guest, written after his release, sent a Korean-American reverend back to his childhood village to confront a massacre both Koreas preferred to forget: testimony with the documentary weight of a writer who had paid personally for crossing the same border. He remains one of Korea's most prolific and internationally translated novelists.