Lee Jangwook

Lee was a resident at the University of Iowa International Writing Program in 2008, which he participated in as a courtesy of the Korea Literature Translation Institute. At that residency Lee spoke about traveling to Russia, "Fourteen years ago, in the winter of 1994, I embarked on a long journey from St. Petersburg to Chuvashia with Andrei, who was my roommate at the time," and expressed his own view of the role of literature's role in society:

Lee has published two collections of poetry in Korea, Sand Mountain in My Sleep and Hopeful Songs at Noon (2006). He is also a novelist, having written, Cheerful Devils of Callot. In addition to strictly literary works, he has written two collections of literary criticism, My Gloomy Modern Boy (2005) and Revolution and Modernism: Russian Poetry and Its Aesthetics (2005).

Born in Seoul, Korea in 1968, Lee Jangwook majored in Russian literature the undergraduate and graduate school levels at Korea University. He has worked as an editor and also as a Professor of Creative Writing at Chosun University in Gwangju Korea. Lee began his writing career in earnest in 1994 with a series of poems being published as winners of the new writer's award in the poetry division of the literary journal Contemporary Literature.