The Prisoner: A Memoir

The Prisoner: A Memoir

Regular price
$39.95
Sale price
$39.95
Regular price
$39.95
OUT OF STOCK
Unit price
per 
Shipping calculated at checkout.

Author/Contributor(s): Sok-yong, Hwang; Kim-Russell, Sora; Hur, Anton
Publisher: Verso
Date: 8/3/2021
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: NEW
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.