Koreana's chief editor wins Korea Foundation Award

Lee Kyong-hee, left, editor-in-chief of Koreana magazine, and Lee Si-hyung, president of the Korea Foundation, pose after Lee Kyong-hee won this year’s Korea Foundation Award at the Westin Chosun Hotel in central Seoul, Friday. / Courtesy of KF

By Park Jin-hai

Lee Kyong-hee, chief editor of Koreana, a quarterly cultural magazine published by the Korea Foundation, who began her long journalist career with The Korea Times in 1970, won this year’s Korea Foundation Award, Friday.

The Korea Foundation (KF), a non-profit public diplomacy organization promoting Korean culture abroad, confers the prize biannually to honor an exceptional person who has made great contributions to enhancing understanding of Korea around the world.

“Starting as a culture reporter with The Korea Times, I’ve worked my entire life to promote Korean culture abroad. Still there is a lack of information for the world to understand Korean culture and even rarer for those documents to be eloquently translated into different languages. I’m doing my job, feeling that I’m throwing little stones into the vast ocean,” said Lee during an interview with The Korea Times, prior to the award ceremony, which was held at Westin Chosun Hotel in central Seoul.

Lee served as editor-in-chief of the Korea Herald and KF’s monthly webzine Korea Focus. She also authored books on Korea, including “Korean Culture: Legacies and Lore” and “World Heritage in Korea.”

She joined Koreana as its editor-in-chief in 2011. The multi-language magazine, translated into ten other foreign languages, marks its 30th anniversary this year. “In 1987, there had been no magazine like this and still now there are no other magazines to benchmark. I joke with my colleagues that we are doing what even the U.N. cannot do.”

Lee said the editorial direction of the magazine has changed over the years. “When the magazine was launched, we had to focus on introducing our cultural heritage. But times have changed and I think we should expand our topics to include those of common interest that can be enjoyed and shared with all our readers,” she said. “Culture and art are easily brushed off as secondary issues, compared with more pressing issues of politics or the economy. If we only talk about traditional arts and cultural heritage, our magazine would be so far from reality.”

In order to prevent this, the magazine launched new sections. “Tales of Two Koreas,” reports about the South-North Korea relationship in terms of the arts. The “Unordinary Day” section follows the daily life of ordinary people from dawn to dusk, for instance, a day with a fried chicken shop owner or a karaoke owner, who are anonymous but can represent the social class they are in today.

“By picturing the way modern Koreans live as it is, showing where we are headed and sharing it, I think people in different parts of the world can better understand Korea. It is also what the KF is aiming for,” said Lee.