Yi Mun-yol

Yi Mun-yol was born in Seoul in 1948; when his father defected to North Korea during the Korean War, the family was left stigmatized under South Korea's anti-communist laws as relatives of a traitor, a wound that runs under much of his fiction. His youth was itinerant and unsettled, and he dropped out of Seoul National University before turning fully to writing.

His breakout novellas Son of Man and Hail to the Emperor established him in the late 1970s, but Our Twisted Hero, published in 1987 and awarded the Yi Sang Literary Prize, became his most widely read work: a compact classroom allegory for dictatorship's seductions that Korean students still study as a coded reckoning with the country's own authoritarian decades.

He became one of Korea's best-selling novelists, prolific across historical, satirical, and autobiographical fiction, while his outspoken conservative politics in later life made him one of the country's most publicly debated literary figures.