Ahn Junghyo


Ahn Junghyo is a South Korean novelist and literary translator.

Life

He was born December 2, 1941, in Seoul, where he graduated from Sogang University with a BA in English literature in 1965. He worked as an English-language writer for the Korea Herald in 1964, and later served as a director for the Korea Times in 1975-1976. He was Editorial Director for the Korean Division of Encyclopædia Britannica from 1971 to 1974.
He made his debut as a translator in 1975, when he published a Korean translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez which was serialized in the monthly . From that time until the late 1980s, he translated approximately 150 foreign works into Korean.

Work

His first novel was Of War and the Metropolis, now known as White War, which was published in 1983 to a chilly critical reception. It discussed his experiences as a Republic of Korea Army soldier in the Vietnam War. He translated it into English and had it published in the United States, where it was released by SoHo Publishing in 1989 under the title The White Badge. In 1992 it was also made into a film, White Badge, shot on location in Vietnam. The book was then reissued in Korea as White War in 1993, and was received much more favorably than before.

Works in Korean

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