Eun Heekyung

In 2014, she participated in the International Writing Program's Fall Residency at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, IA.

Eun has won other awards including the 1997 Dongseo Literature Award, the 1998 Yi Sang Literary Award, the 2000 Korean Literature Award, the Munhak Dongne Literature Award in 1996, the Korean Literature Award for Fiction in 2000, the Hanguk Ilbo Literature Award in 2002, and the 2007 Dong-in Literary Award for Beauty Snubs Me. In 2012 her story "Discovery of Solitude" was chosen by LTI Korea as one of three short stories to be the subject of their LTI Essay competition.

Eun made her entrance to the Korean literary scene in 1995 with her short novel Duet. The next year won the Munhakdongne Fiction Award for her novel A Gift From a Bird which portrayed the world of adults through the skeptical eyes of a twelve-year-old narrator. Since her debut she has written 10 books, including six collections of short stories and four novels. Secrets and Lies, published in 2005, is the three-generation story of two interrelated families.

Eun left for middle school in Seoul, where she was an average student and entered Sookmyung University in 1977, a time of tremendous political tumult. Since childhood Eun had desired to be a writer, but upon her graduation from Sookmyung she took jobs as a high school teacher, editor, and reporter. In 1994 she took a leave of absence from her work and went to a temple armed with a laptop computer, nearly a dozen books, and a decades' worth of diaries. In her stay at the temple she finished five short stories and a novella. The novella was A Duet, which won a Spring Literary Contest in 1995.

Eun's Gift from a Bird is a coming of age novel that takes place between 1969 and 1995. Kang Jinhee, a woman in her mid-30s, reminisces about her life as a spirited twelve-year-old girl. In the beginning of the novel, she declares: “When I turned twelve, there was no need for me to grow.” In order to survive her troubled life, the young Jinhee learns to detach herself from her emotions. Asserting that people should observe themselves from a distance, she comes to possess a cynical and contemptuous personality, which becomes her defense mechanism.

Eun Heekyung (born in 1959) is a South Korean writer.

Eun was born in Gochang, Jeollabuk-do in 1959. She did her undergraduate degree in literature at Sookmyung Women's University, and her graduate degree in the same field at Yonsei University, both in Seoul. Her childhood was full of fairy tales and children's stories that her parents purchased for her. Eun once stated, "My most important reading was pretty much done during my childhood." Even as a student she always read books (non-schoolbooks), and also recounts reading so intently that she failed to hear that school was ending, and only realizing it when she was surrounded by silence as the other students had left. She also discovered that other students were sometimes reading her diary, and for this reason she began to intersperse into it made up stories or lines aimed at specific readers.