Award-winning Authors' Press Conference on the 6th and Ceremony on the 7th Next Month
Eunpyeong-gu, Seoul (Mayor Kim Mi-kyung) announced on the 7th that Anna Burns from Northern Ireland has been selected for the main prize of the upcoming ‘8th Lee Ho-cheol Tongillo Literary Award,’ and writer Kim Mella has been chosen for the special prize.
Now in its 8th year, the ‘Lee Ho-cheol Tongillo Literary Award’ was established by Eunpyeong-gu in 2017 to honor the literary activities and the spirit of yearning for unification of the late Lee Ho-cheol, a representative writer of unification literature who worked in Bulgwang-dong, Eunpyeong-gu for over 50 years. The award aims to serve as a focal point for future unification efforts.
Eunpyeong-gu will hold the press conference for the ‘8th Lee Ho-cheol Tongillo Literary Award Main Prize’ on November 6, the award ceremony on the 7th, and related events consecutively on the 8th.
The 8th awardees were selected through a total of eight rounds of judging from January to June this year by the Lee Ho-cheol Tongillo Literary Award Steering Committee and the Main Prize Selection Committee, composed of experts from literature, academia, and journalism.
Main prize winner Anna Burns is a leading contemporary Irish writer, born in 1962 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The region and period where she was born and raised coincided with the Northern Ireland conflict, and the experiences from that time later influenced her literary world.
She debuted in 2001 with her first novel No Bones, and in 2018, she gained worldwide recognition by winning the Booker Prize with her third novel Milk Man, becoming the first Northern Irish author to receive the award.
The issues behind the conflict that Anna Burns addresses in her novels include the pervasive violence in everyday life and the oppressive social atmosphere that dominates individual minds. These are not problems limited to Northern Ireland; they are also familiar when looking at Korea’s modern history, which experienced Japanese colonial occupation and decades of military dictatorship. Her works vividly demonstrate that the dangers of violence are comprehensive and universal.
The Lee Ho-cheol Tongillo Literary Award values literary practice that contemplates and overcomes problems arising from conflicts, women’s issues, refugees, violence, and war occurring on a global scale. The 8th Main Prize Committee found the literary value and significance aligned with this in Anna Burns’ works and selected her as the main prize winner.
The special prize winner for the 8th Lee Ho-cheol Tongillo Literary Award, Kim Mella, is a pen name derived from the Jeju dialect word ‘melreuda,’ meaning ‘to distort.’ Her real name is Kim Eun-young, and this year marks her 10th year since debut. As evidenced by her winning the ‘Munhakdongne Young Writers’ Award’ four years in a row, she is one of the most promising young writers in the Korean literary scene.
Writer Kim Mella is known for addressing serious themes with a cheerful and humorous writing style. The 8th Special Prize Selection Committee evaluated that Kim Mella is a writer with fresh writing and that the awareness of issues shown through her work High Sense of the Nonexistent Floor indicates her continuous progress as a writer. They also selected her as the special prize winner with expectations that she will continue to bring fresh winds as a representative young writer of today’s Korean literary world.
The press conference will be held at 10 a.m. on the 6th of next month at the 19th-floor press conference room of the Korea Press Center. The award ceremony will take place at 10 a.m. on the 7th at the Lee Ho-cheol Book Concert Hall, followed by a ‘Meeting with the Main Prize Winner’ at 2 p.m. On the 8th, a ‘Meeting with the Special Prize Winner’ will be held at 2 p.m. For inquiries about the events, please contact the Culture and Tourism Division of Eunpyeong-gu Office.
Mayor Kim Mi-kyung said, “Eunpyeong-gu is proud to be the place where Lee Ho-cheol spent his final days and to honor his will by inheriting the value of unification. We will continue to strive to establish Eunpyeong-gu as a space that talks about peace and unification through various cultural and artistic events.”
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