User:Ccmontgom/Yang Gui-ja

Yang Gui-ja (born 1955)  is a South Korean writer.

Life
Yang Gwija was born July 1th, 1995 in Jeonju, Jeollabuk-do and graduated from Weongwang University in 1978 with a degree in Korean Literature. She later moved to Seoul after her marriage in 1980. Yang made her literary debut with the short stories Starting a New Morning and The Door Already Closed (two titles which hint at the breadth of her approach). In 1986 she achieved popular success with the release of her collection of linked short stories (yeonjak seosal) Neighbors in Wonmi-dong. For which she is still most famous. This collection was a painstaking depiction of the lives of people on the periphery of industrial culture. In 998 Yang won the Fifth Yoo Juhyoen Literature award and followed up by winning the even more prestigious Lee Sang Literature Award in 1992. As the 1990s turned into a consumer culture in Korea, and a mood of disillusionment replaced the political (and to some extent economic) hope that had characterized the nation. Yang’s work followed along. In 1992 she wrote “The Hidden Flower” which told the story, in some ways autobiographical, or an author searching for new hope after her old ideals have been destroyed. In “The Road to Cheonma Tombs,” Yang’s protagonist successfully struggles to come to terms with his past trauma and current powerlessness. “The Hidden Flower” and The Road to Cheonma Tombs are collected with three other stories,”Mountain Flower,” Opportunist,” and “Sadness Gives Strength,” in a collection named for the latter story.

Since the mid-1980s she has been known as more than an fiction writer, writing in women's magazines, newspapers, and other general media. In the 1990s she also opened a popular restaurant in Seoul.

Work
Yang's best-known early work, was the 1987 Wonmi-dong saramdeul (Neighbors in Wonmi-dong), which depicted the isolation and alienated status of small towns as a result of modernization. This work was published in English as A Distant and Beautiful Place. During the 1990s Yang's fiction became more and more personal featuring a run of popular works that included Contradictions (Mosun), which was the best-selling Korean novel of 1998.

Works in English
A Distant and Beautiful Place

Contradictions

Rust

Works in Korean (Partial)
Along the River of Babylon

The Deaf Bird

Hope

I Wish for What is Forbidden to Me

Neighbors in Wonmi-dong

Sorrow Can Be Power

Love for a Thousand Years

Contradictions