Hankook Ilbo: A Balanced View of the World

The 10 nominees for the 55th Hankook Ilbo Literary Award in 2022 have been chosen. This year’s nominations are Mela Kim’s ‘Dream My Dream’ (Munhak Dongnae) (author’s name is Gana Dasoon), Jiyeon Kim ‘Sound Without Heart’ (Munhak Dongne), Jihyeok Moon ‘When We Cross the Bridge’ (Dasan Bookstore) , Jihyeon Song ‘What We Eat in Summer (Munhakdongne), Jang-wook Lee ‘Trotsky and Wild Ran’ (Changbi), Joo-hye Lee ‘The Cat’s Name is Long’ (Changbi), Sol -ah Lim ‘Say It’s Nothing’ (Literature and Intelligence), Yong-jun Jung ‘Walking in Seolleung’ (Munhak-dongne), Jo Gyeong-red ‘family circumstances’ (Munhak-dongne), and ‘Perfect Life’ Jo Hae-jin (Changbi). The Hankuk Ilbo Literary Award, established in 1968, is awarded to a work that has the best literary achievement among Korean novels published in the past year and can lead a new trend in Korean literature. This year’s judging target is works published as Korean novels according to ISBN code classification between September 2021 and August 2022. Among them, novel collections, novellas, and novellas, excluding revised editions and anthologies, light novels and youth novels, were the heats. This year’s judges, Seong-ran Ha, Seong-hee Yun, Seong-tae Jeon, novelist Sang-su Park, Dong-ho Kang, literary critic Hye-jin Park, and poet So-ran Park selected 10 nominations by preliminary test on the 14th of the last month. The trial was conducted via video conference via Zoom. This year has been a year of attention to colorful novels. Nine out of 10 nominated are collections of short stories, and works that offer a different charm and depth to the work were nominated through ‘houses’, which are grouped together as opposed to being read by one piece. The dissatisfaction with long and rather light novels was resolved with Jo Hae-jin’s ‘Perfect Life’, which was praised as “a work that made good use of the aesthetics of a light length novel.” The faces of the writers also varied. Jang-wook Lee, Hae-jin Jo, Yong-jun Jung, and Sol-ah Lim are writers who have been consistently nominated for the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award for the past two or three years due to their energetic work. This year, as always, Korean literature stunned with high-quality works. On the contrary, there are authors who have received favorable reviews for their first novels. Lee Joo-hye extended the narrative of a middle-aged woman to Korean literature with ‘The Cat’s Name is Long’, and Kim Ji-yeon added novelty with ‘The Sound of No Heart’. The main contents and features of the 10 books that passed the preliminary examination for the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award will be presented through the Hankook Ilbo newspaper every Tuesday and Thursday starting today. The order of the presentation is in alphabetical order according to the author’s name. The final winner will be announced at the end of this month.