Ko Un

In Abiding Places, Korean poet Ko Un has transfigured his homeland in lovely, observant, and penetrating poems uniting ancient and modern, secular and spiritual, art and politics, South and North. When his former political cellmate Kim Dae-Jung became President of Korea in 1998, Ko Un became the first citizen from the South to be invited to tour the North. From that visit came this deceptively simple and deeply engaging book.

Sunny Jung and Hillel Schwartz provide lyrical and penetrating translations, and complement the poems with essential maps.

Ko Un is Korea’s most prolific living writer. Born in colonial Korea in 1933, Ko Un has written 15 volumes of poetry and has twice won the prestigious Korean Literature Prize. His work has been translated into seventeen languages. In 1999, he was Visiting Research Scholar at the Harvard-Korea Institute.

Awards

Korean Literary Awards (1974, 1987)
Manhae Literary Awards (1989)
Daesan Literary Awards (1994)
Manhae Grand Prize (1998)
Buddhist Literary Awards (1999)
Shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for Literature (2002, 2004)
Danjae Prize (2004)
Unification Award (2005)
Bjornson Order for Literature, The Norwegian Order for Literary Merits (2005)
Cikada Prize (2006)

Links

Ko Un’s elegant website can be found at Koun.co.kr

In 2006, the third annual Cikada Prize was awarded to Ko Un.