The Prisoner: A Memoir

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.