Hwang Sok-Yong's memoir 'The Prisoner' examines truth through Korean history and personal incarceration

At the age of seventy-eight, Hwang Sok-Yong, a South Korean novelist and activist, released his memoir titled 'The Prisoner', which was first published in Korean in 2017. The book recounts his life story, including a five-year incarceration in South Korea during the mid-1990s following a trip to North Korea in 1989 and a subsequent four-year exile. Hwang, who was born in Manchuria and relocated to Pyongyang at two before his family escaped to Seoul, began his activism in the 1970s, inspired by the Gwangju Uprising. His memoir, which details eighteen hunger strikes and alternates between his prison life and personal history, is translated by Anton Hur and Sora Kim Russell and released by Verso for £30.