Kim Young-ha

Kim Young-ha is a South Korean novelist and short-story writer whose fiction explores urban life, memory, identity, and political history.

I Have the Right to Destroy Myself: Kim Young-ha’s novel follows a man who helps clients plan their deaths and becomes entangled with two brothers. This early novel established his stark, urban fiction about death, desire, and self-fashioning.
The Quiz Show: Kim Young-ha’s novel portrays young adults navigating ambition, work, and popular culture in contemporary South Korea. The novel shows his recurring interest in how media and urban pressures shape young lives.
Anton Hur: Anton Hur is a South Korean literary translator who translates Korean fiction into English. His English translation of Your Republic Is Calling You helped bring Kim’s fiction to a wider readership.
North Korean defectors: People who leave North Korea and settle elsewhere, often in South Korea. Their experiences provide a real-world frame for the divided Korean identities explored in his novels.
Your Republic Is Calling You: Kim Young-ha’s novel follows a North Korean agent living undercover in South Korea as his mission changes. Its divided-identity plot brings political history into the private life of an ordinary-seeming protagonist.
Diary of a Murderer: Kim Young-ha’s novella follows an aging former serial killer whose memory is failing as a new threat emerges. Its compressed form and unreliable memory demonstrate his range beyond full-length novels.
Charles Montgomery: Charles Montgomery is an American translator and scholar of Korean literature. His translations include Kim Young-ha’s I Have the Right to Destroy Myself.
Korean War: The 1950–1953 conflict between North and South Korea and their allies, ending in an armistice. The war’s unresolved division forms the historical backdrop to his stories of agents and divided loyalties.
Black Flower: Kim Young-ha’s historical novel follows Korean emigrants who arrive in Mexico in 1905 and face labor exploitation. This novel extends his fiction from contemporary cities into Korean migration and colonial-era history.
Kim Young-ha's Writing Machine: A collection of essays by Kim Young-ha on literature, writing, and the life of a writer. These essays make his reflections on fiction and literary practice available alongside his stories.

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Gu Byeong-moRelated: His global readership offers a point of comparison for contemporary Korean novelists reaching translation markets.