Winner of the prestigious Tongin and Yi Sang awards, Ch'oe Yun is known for her breathtaking stylistic versatility and bold exploration of the inner life. Her fiction writing, which began to appear in the late 1990s, represents a move toward a more experimental, postmodern Korean fiction. Yet despite the author's celebrated play with fantasy, Ch'oe Yun is deeply concerned with history, and her work cleverly deconstructs socialist-nationalist narratives of emancipation. She also refuses to adhere to the traditional subjects of "women's writing," focusing instead on the role of gender in the making of Korean history. There a Petal Silently Falls is Ch'oe Yun's best known work. Debuting in 1998, it was inspired by the Kwangju Massacre of 1980, in which 2,000 civilians were killed for protesting the government's military rule. The novella recounts the wanderings of a girl traumatized by her mother's murder and exemplifies the injustice of state-sanctioned violence against women.The second story in this collection, "Whisper Yet," is a satire that portrays the harsh treatment of leftist intellectuals during the years of national division; and the third story, "The Thirteen-Scent Flower," tells of a girl who grows a fragrant flower, whose exotic beauty becomes the source of conflict and tragedy. Elegantly crafted and styled, Ch'oe Yun's stories are some of the finest works to examine the psychological and spiritual reality of post-World War II Korea.

Author Biography

Ch'oe Yun, in addition to being an award-winning author, is professor of French literature at S?gang University in Seoul, Korea, and has translated contemporary Korean fiction into French. She received the 1992 Tongin Literature Prize for "The Gray Snowman" and the 1994 Yi Sang Literature Prize for "The Last of Hanak'o." Translations of her works can be found in Modern Korean Fiction: An Anthology (Columbia University Press, 2005) and Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction. Her writings have also been translated into French and Spanish. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton are the translators of the Korean women's anthologies Words of Farewell and Wayfarer and cotranslators with Marshall R. Pihl of Land of Exile. They have also translated contemporary Korean novels such as Hwang Sun-won's Trees on a Slope and Cho Se-hui's The Dwarf. Bruce Fulton is the inaugural holder of the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation at the University of British Columbia, cotranslator of A Ready-Made Life, coeditor of Modern Korean Fiction, feature editor of Seeing the Invisible, and associate editor for Korea of The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature.