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| Choi In-hun / Korea Times file |
By Jung Da-min
Award-winning novelist Choi In-hun, best-known for his works delving into the country's post-Korean War era and inter-Korean division, died of cancer on Monday. He was 84.
Choi died at a hospital in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, northwest of Seoul. He was diagnosed with terminal-stage colorectal cancer four months ago.
His funeral will be at Seoul National University Hospital in Jongno, Seoul, on Wednesday.
Choi received many prestigious literary awards, including the Dong-in Literary Award (1966), Yi Sang Literary Award (1994), and Park Kyung-ri Literary Award (2011). He was a professor of creative writing at Seoul Institute of the Arts from 1977 to 2001.
Choi was born in 1934 in Hoeryong, North Hamgyong Province, in North Korea. His family fled to Wonsan, Gangwon Province, in 1947, after the Soviet army branded his father as "bourgeois." His family was a victim of a bloody ideological conflict that raged across the Korean Peninsula after the country was liberated from Japanese colonial rule in 1945.
Following the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, he fled to South Korea and spent about a month in a refugee camp in Busan before settling in Mokpo, South Jeolla Province, where his relatives had settled.
He entered Seoul National University's college of law in 1952, but dropped out in 1956. He received an honorary degree in 2016 in recognition of his towering achievement in Korean literature.
He made his debut in 1959 with two novels ― "A Detailed Record of Grey Club," which tells about Korea's post-war era ― and "A Raoul Story," which is about Christianity.
He made his name with "The Square," a 1960 novel depicting the troubled life of a Korean prisoner of war (POW) who ends up taking his own life amid an intensified ideological rift in the post-Korean War era.
Choi was survived by his wife and two children.
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