This collection portrays the lives of common people, and the rhythm of the verse is consonant with the colloquial style of the Korean language. After making his literary debut in 1956, Shin Kyung-rim refused to take part in Korean literary circles, which were inclined to modernism at that time. Afterwards he went to his hometown, Choongju, where he wandered and worked as a farmer and peddler for 10 years. The fruit of Shin Kyung-rim’s thirty years of life experience, this book became a great sensation in Korean poetical circles and among the reading public of the 1970s, which had a hard time escaping from the maze of complicated and artificial modernism. He prefigured the powerful future of people’s literature by realistically narrating the sad history of farmers, thereby generating a force that seeped into people’s consciousness. This collection immediately made him one of the most influential poets in Korea. This monumental book was translated into English as one of the Cornell East Asian Series, and was selected one of “The Hundred Books of Korea.” The book won the Manhae Literature Prize.
Fiction
Poetry
