Park Wan-suh

Park Wan-suh was born in Gaepung, in what is now North Korea, and moved to Seoul as a child. The Korean War tore through her family just as she began university studies in Korean literature: her brother was killed amid the chaos of the conflict, and she went to work supporting the family at a U.S. Army PX, where she came to know the painter Park Soo-keun.

She married, raised five children, and published nothing until she was forty, when her novel The Naked Tree (drawing on her wartime PX years and her friendship with Park Soo-keun) won a literary contest and launched a career that lasted four more decades. Who Ate Up All the Shinga? later returned directly to her own girlhood, tracing the war's devastation and the hollow promises of the wealth that followed.

She went on to become one of modern Korea's most widely read novelists, unsparing about both wartime trauma and the materialism of the country's later economic boom, until her death in 2011.