Kim Eon Hee

She won the 2005 Gyeongnam Literary Award (경남문학상), the 2013 Yi Sang  Literary Award for Poetry, the 2014 Poetry and Thought Literary Award (시와사상문학상), and the 2016 Tongyeong City Cheongma Literary Award (통영시 문학상 청마문학상). From 2016 to 2019, she served as the chairperson for the Council for the Enhancement of Equality in Literature (형명문학선양사업회) and has served as the chairperson of the Equality in Literary Institutions Steering Committee (형명문학제 운영위원회) since 2019.

The most notable characteristics of Kim Eon Hee's poetry are her brutal images of bodies, the use of explicit language and slang, and the use of a direct eroticism. Lines such as “Escaping as I drag my entrails dribbling out of me,” “My flayed open belly,” “Your penis that skewers me from my mouth to my anus like a thread” that portray figures such as prostitutes consistently appear in her poems from Teureongkeu (1995) to Bogo sipeun oppa (2016). Because of her use of unconventional language and bizarre poetic images, her poetry has been called “unintelligible poetry,” “destructive poetry,” and “poetry of cruelty.”

In 1989, she published the poem “Goyohan nara” (고요한 나라 Tranquil Land) along with nine others and emerged within the literary world. Beginning with her first poetry collection, Teureongkeu (트렁크 Trunk), in 1995, she has shocked the literary world with her brutal and obscene images. Moreover, there was a controversy within feminist circles regarding the violence towards women's bodies portrayed in her 2000 poetry collection, Mallajugeun aengdunamu arae jamjaneun jeo yeoja (말라죽은 앵두나무 아래 잠자는 저 여자 That Girl Sleeping Beneath the Withered Cherry Tree). With the publication of Tteutbakkui daedap (뜻밖의 대답 Unexpected Response) in 2005, she demonstrated a prominent change with her questioning of poetry in and of itself becoming more serious and a notable esotericism. In her 2011 collection, Yojeum uulhasimnikka? (요즘 우울하십니까? Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days?), she broke from conventional Korean publishing practices in which separately authored introductions and a commentary or interpretation is included within Korean poetry books. Instead, she chose to forego these two sections and included her own author's introduction and epilogue. This poetry collection was translated into English and published in 2019 in the United States. In 2016, she published her poetry collection Bogo sipeun oppa (보고 싶은 오빠 The Man I Miss). In 2004, she quit her teaching activities of nearly 30 years and decided to solely devote herself to her creative writing.

Kim Eon Hee (Korean: 김언희, born 1953) is a South Korean poet. She is known as the “Medusa of Korean poetry" for her use of unconventional language, grotesque images, and destruction in various forms in order to continuously shock readers.

Kim Eon Hee was born in 1953 in Jinju, Gyeongsang Province. In her second year at Jinju Girls’ Middle School, she won first place in her school's writing contest and received the guidance of Poet Kim Suk-kyu, becoming active in her school's literature club. Her high school homeroom teacher once told her that her personality was “excessively honest” and she herself has stated that she has a “hatred towards excessive coyness.” This personality is expressed through a straightforwardness and radicalness and also manifests itself in Kim Eon Hee's poetic world which seems at odds with/incongruous with the real world/reality/life. When her first poetry collection received negative reviews, her husband attempted to dissuade her from writing poetry and she reportedly gave him the cold shoulder and stopped talking to him for six months.