Who is the South Korean poet behind ‘Autobiography of Death'? Inside Kim Hyesoon's searing verse

Indian Express

19-07-2025

South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon has been awarded the 2025 International Prize for Literature by Germany's Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures, HKW) for her searing and surreal poetry collection Autobiography of Death. She is the first Asian writer to receive the award.
The award, shared with translators Park Sool and Uljana Wolf, recognises an outstanding work of contemporary international literature translated into German. Kim's collection, originally published in Korean in 2016 and released in German by S Fischer Verlag earlier this year, was selected unanimously by the jury, which praised her 'enigmatic' poetry as a revelation of meaning 'only visible when the right direction has already been taken.'
At the core of Autobiography of Death lies a 49-part elegy that draws on Buddhist funerary tradition, representing the journey of a soul across forty-nine days after death. But in Kim's hands, this structure becomes a powerful metaphor for the recursive trauma of a nation haunted by political violence and personal loss. 'We remain living,' she has said, 'in the structure of death.' Her poems are acts of spiritual insurgency: dense, grotesque, and unrelenting.
Born in Uljin, South Korea, and raised by her grandmother, Kim has built her poetic voice in direct opposition to the passive lyricism historically expected of Korean women poets. Since publishing her early work in the resistance-era journal Munhak kwa Jisong (Literature and Intellect) during the politically fraught 1970s and 1980s, Kim has used poetry as a site of political, bodily, and linguistic refusal. In a society where women's experiences were often erased or aestheticised into docility, Kim's voice remains a rupture.
Her lines pulse with images of illness, animality, motherhood, and death, rendered in a style that blends surrealism with fierce interiority. She speaks not for the individual but for the multitude: for girls buried under patriarchal histories, for mothers silenced by war, for bodies dismembered by language. In her words, 'the language of women's poetry is internal, yet defiant and revolutionary.'
This defiance has earned Kim many firsts: the first woman to win both the Kim Su-yŏng and Midang Literary Awards, the first South Korean poet to receive the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize, and now the first Asian writer to receive HKW's International Prize.
Much of Kim's international recognition can also be attributed to her long-time English translator Don Mee Choi, whose own work has illuminated the political and linguistic complexities of Korean-American poetics. Together, Kim and Choi have forged a transnational feminist aesthetic that refuses erasure, from I'm OK, I'm Pig! to Autobiography of Death, their collaborations have pushed the boundaries of what lyric poetry can hold.
With its visceral depictions of unjust deaths and its incantatory, recursive rhythm, Autobiography of Death does not seek to comfort. It mourns with teeth bared. 'Kim's poetry,' wrote Publishers Weekly in a starred review, 'reveals the startling architecture she develops to display structural horrors, individual loss, and the links between them.'
Kim Hyesoon lives in Seoul and teaches at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.
Aishwarya Khosla is a journalist currently serving as Deputy Copy Editor at The Indian Express. Her writings examine the interplay of culture, identity, and politics.
She began her career at the Hindustan Times, where she covered books, theatre, culture, and the Punjabi diaspora. Her editorial expertise spans the Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Punjab and Online desks.
She was the recipient of the The Nehru Fellowship in Politics and Elections, where she studied political campaigns, policy research, political strategy and communications for a year.
She pens The Indian Express newsletter, Meanwhile, Back Home.
Write to her at [e-mail] or [e-mail]. You can follow her on Instagram: @ink_and_ideology, and X: @KhoslaAishwarya. ... Read More