Verso snares Hwang Sok-Yong's imprisonment memoir

Verso Books is to publish the memoir of Korean novelist Hwang Sok-Yong, which details the years he spent in a Seoul Detention Centre. 

Jessie Kindig acquired world English rights to The Prisoner from Laura Susjin at The Susjin Agency. 

The synopsis explains: "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 20th century."

The author's writing, exploring the troubled history of a violently divided Korea, has achieved international acclaim, and his status as as an imprisoned, exiled, and dissident author has been championed by World PEN. His novels include At Dusk and Familiar Things (both Scribe UK), and The Guest (Seven Stories Press).

The memoir is slated for publication in August 2021.