KOH SUN WOONG
He is the artistic director of Playfactory Mabangzen. He has staged numerous plays including Aging Skill, The Buffalo Moon, Marijuana, Wonderful Life the musical, The Fortress, Werther, and Gwangju. He made his literary debut in the new writers’ contest sponsored by Hankookilbo in 1999 and was selected for the program of original plays sponsored by the National Theater Company of Korea in 2000. He was the recipient of the Okrang Theater Award in 2001, the Young Artist Award of Today in 2006, and the Lee Haerang Theater Award in 2019. He’s a highly sought-after director who works in different genres including musical, drama, changgeuk, and opera. He also worked as the artistic director of the Gyeonggido Theater Company, and he successfully directed the opening and closing ceremony of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Paralympics.
KIM KYUNG JU
He started working as a playwright when his play A Wolf’s Eyeballs Grow First was staged by the experimental theater company Hyehwa-dong No. 1. His next play, Windup Spring, was selected for the original plays contest sponsored by Dong-A Daily. His published plays include A Wolf’s Eyeballs Grow First, Windup Spring, There Was No One to Love Me When I Was Prettiest, and Butterfly Sleep.
AN JUN WON
He is a novelist and playwright. While working as an assistant director in Playfactory Mabangzen, he wrote an adaptation of Modern Times in 2017 which launched his career as a playwright. In 2018, he made his debut as a fiction writer in the literary magazine Contemporary Literature, and now he writes plays and novels. He was the winner of the Pyeongsari Literary Award in 2017, and he was selected as one of the Aspiring Young Artists in the genre of the novel for the Arts and Creativity Academy sponsored by the Arts Council of Korea, and also as one of the best fiction writers by the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation in 2019. He wrote Gwangju the musical, I Wasn’t There in Gwangju, Bear? What Kind of Bear? the novel, and People Who Build Houses.
Translated by Stella H. Kim
A freelance interpreter and translator. She has an MA in East Asian Languages and Culture from Columbia University and in Korean-English interpretation and translation from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. She is the winner of the 2014 LTI Korea Translation Award for Aspiring Translators in 2014 and the 2016 Korea Times Modern Korean Literature Translation Award. She has received two translation grants from LTI Korea for the translation of Kim Seong Joong's short story collections The Comedian and Border Market. Her translations include Choi Jung-wha’s “Shoes,” Lee Jang-wook’s “Old Man River,” Kim Seong Joong’s “The Comedian” and “Children in the Air,” which have appeared in literary journals, such as Asymptote, Asia Literary Review, Korean Literature Now, and ASIA.
