Yeom Seungsuk

She later resumed her literary writing career with the release of her second novel Let's Not Be Here in 2018.

In 2017, Yeom began her career as a literary critic. According to her, she gradually came to write literary criticisms because she continued to read works of other authors and asked herself questions as a reader. Her debut work No Future and the Speed of an Excavator: Criticism on Time of a City by Park Sol-moe received positive critical reviews for its firm critical consciousness of and serious interest in issues facing younger generations of Koreans who cannot expect any stable future.

Since 2017, she has been hosting a podcast show entitled Table Talk by Novelists Yeom Seungsuk and Yun Ko Eun. Yeom says that she launched this podcast show because she wanted to ‘communicate with aspiring writers and readers about novel writing’ as she previously had many concerns about how to write a novel before becoming an author herself.

Yeom's critical consciousness of issues in ordinary people's lives later leads to her satirical novels. In Some Countries are Just Too Big, she creates Bingo World consisting of too big a world and too small humans. In Bingo World, managed by a large construction firm, people live standardised lives as equally shaped Bingo pieces. The novel also contains an allegory of controversial Korean political incidents, such as the 2012 NIS public opinion manipulation scandal. One notable anonymous reviewer said the literary devices "effectively satirize the social conditions of this age that constantly shake one’s individual identity".

Similarly, in Nowhere Man (2011), fantastical accidents, such as metamorphosis, the disappearance of a person and the outbreak of an epidemic, occur commonly. However, unlike in Chaplin, Chaplin, the realities facing characters in this novel are much more realistic. Most of them are those excluded from social safety nets, such as a bankrupt debtor, an irregular worker, a person removed from the resident registration. For these characters, who were alienated from a society filled with cutthroat competitions, survival is much more important that moral issues such as truth and lies, the good and the evil. A sense of crisis felt by these individuals on the verge of a devastating end do not stay as their personal experiences but spread to an ever-increasing number of people. In this respect, according to Jeong Ju-a, Yeom's novels approach the invisible crisis looming from each individual's daily life and inner self as a common phenomenon occurring throughout the entire society.

The characters in Chaplin, Chaplin (2008) are all nobodies, with almost no presence. They have ordinary jobs, for instance, as a public servant working at a city hall, a real estate agent, and a physical therapist. They lead an oppressed existence burdened by repetitive daily routines. Then one day, strange, fantastical things happen to them: They come across a big rat with the tail of a snake, which pursues human tailbones, their teeth are replaced by the bones of an iguanodon, and a strange plague, which paralyzes one's body fixed in a slanting position, breaks out. These bizarre circumstances provide them with opportunities to restore identities that were gradually lost in familiar daily routines.

In 2005, she made her formal debut piece called Baemkkoriwangjwi, which gave her an accolade for New Writers’ Award for the Hyundae Munhak magazine. Since then, she has made more stories: most notably Chaplin, Chaplin in 2008; Nowhere Man in 2013 and Let's Not Be Here in 2018. Her novels deal with the desperate realities facing ordinary people in contemporary society and the issue of lost identity, in magical and fantastical narratives.

Yeom made her literary debut in 2005 by publishing a short story entitled Baemkkoriwangjwi, followed by the anthologies Chaplin, Chaplin (2008) and Nowhere Man (2011) as well as the novel Some Countries are Just Too Big (2013). She also did several other stort stories for collaborative collections to add to her bibliography.

Yeom Seung-suk (Korean: 염승숙; born 1982) is a South Korean novelist. From 2005, she has steadily published literary works as a novelist, and has also been working as a literary critic since 2017.

Yeom was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1982. During childhood, she would repeatedly read an anthology of Korean contemporary stories and imagine their backstories. To pursue her dream of becoming a novelist, she studied creative writing in college. During her college years, she used to recall her favorite Korean authors and write literary pieces as if she were one of those writers. Then, during her days of practising literature, she used to carry a Korean dictionary with her and memorize words as if she were studying a foreign language, or sometimes she used to invent her own words. Before her formal literary debut, Yeom had already won several literary awards from her own college, which made her professors call her yeomjak (“author Yeom”).