Jung Young-moon

Jung’s debut, the novel A Man who Barely Exists was published in Jakga Segye (Writer’s World) in 1996, and as a novel two years later. The novel portrays a man mired in ennui, in which state he contemplates the meaning of life. Following this he released collections and novels including Black Chain Stories (1998), Pale Soliloquy (2000), Yawn (2006) and, most recently, A Contrived World (2012). Black Chain Stories (A Chain of Dark Tales, in English publication) is a collection of Kafkaesque short stories (some extremely short), which delve into the question of what being means, and what the loss of being means.

In his role as translator, Jung has translated a wide range of work including John Fowles’ Ebony Tower, Raymond Carver’s What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, and Germaine Greer’s The Boy.

Jung Young Moon (This is the author's preferred Romanization per LTI Korea) born in 1965 is a South Korean writer.

Jung Young Moon was born in Hamyang, South Gyeongsang Province in 1965. He graduated from Seoul National University with a degree in psychology. His literary début was in 1996 with the novel A Man Who Barely Exists. Jung is also an accomplished translator who has translated more than forty books from English into Korean. In 1999 he won the 12th Dongseo Literary Award with his collection of short stories, A Chain of Dark Tales. In 2003, the Korean National Theater produced his play The Donkeys. In 2005 Jung was invited to participate in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, and in 2010 the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Korea Study invited him to participate in a three-month-long residency program.