Shin Kyung-sook

Shin’s first novel is a tale of unrequited love between three childhood friends—Eun-seo, Wan and Se—whose lives continue to intercept as they face new challenges in the unfamiliar terrain of adulthood. As the three friends move on from their utopian rural hometown to the big, brutal cities, their hopes and disappointments collide, bringing them together or sometimes pushing them apart. The rapture of love offers shelter, but never for long, for love cannot be shared equally amongst the three of them.

On June 16, 2015, The Huffington Post Korea reported that Shin plagiarized Yukio Mishima's passage from Patriotism in her book Legend. Shin apologised, and her publisher said it would pull a collection of her short stories off the shelves.

Shin has won a wide variety of literary prizes including the Today’s Young Artist Award from the South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Hankook Ilbo Literature Prize, Hyundae Literature Award, Manhae Literature Prize, Dong-in Literary Award, Yi Sang Literary Award, and the Oh Young-su Literature Prize. In 2009, the French translation of her work, A Lone Room (La Chambre Solitaire) was one of the winners of the Prix de l'Inapercu, which recognizes excellent literary works which have not yet reached a wide audience. The international rights to the million-copy bestseller Please Look After Mom were sold in 19 countries including the United States and various countries in Europe and Asia, beginning with China and has been translated into English by Chi-young Kim and released on March 31, 2011. She won the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize for Please Look After Mom, she was the first woman to win that award.

Short stories published in France, Japan, Mongolia and the U.S. Publications in English include The Blind Calf, in The Harvard Review, Fall 2002; The Strawberry Field in Azalea, 2008;

Kyung-sook Shin (This is the author's preferred Romanization per LTI Korea) born 12 January 1963 is a South Korean writer. She is the first South Korean and first woman to win the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012 for Please Look After Mom.

Shin was born in 1963 in a village near Jeongeup, North Jeolla Province in southern South Korea. She was the fourth child and oldest daughter of six. At sixteen she moved to Seoul, where her older brother lived. She worked in an electronics plant while attending night school. She made her literary debut in 1985 with the novella Winter’s Fable after graduating from the Seoul Institute of the Arts as a creative writing major. Shin is, along with Kim In-suk and Gong Ji-young, one of the group of female writers from the so-called 386 Generation.