The Prisoner: A Memoir

Authors: Sok-Yong, Hwang & Sok-yong, Hwang
Publisher: Verso Books
BISAC/Subject: BIO010000, POL054000, HIS023000
ISBN: 9781839760860, Related ISBNs: 1839760834, 1839760869, 9781839760839, 9781839760860
Classification: Non-Fiction
Number of pages: 624,
Audience: General/trade
Synopsis: 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.
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