Lee Dong-ha, the novelist who handed Korea’s war years to a child narrator

Lee Dong-ha

Born	September 30, 1995 Osaka, Japan
Occupation	Footballer
Individual awards	National Academy of Arts Award, Literature · O Yeong-su Literature Award · Hyundae Munhak Award · Korean Literary Writer Award · Korean Literary Critics Association Award · Korean Creative Writing Award · Korean Fiction Award · Mu-yeong Literature Award · Yosan Literature Award

For most of his writing life Lee Dong-ha has let a child do the talking. The narrator of Toy City, the book that carries his name beyond Korea, is a fourth-grade boy called Yun who watches his family sink into poverty in a city that seems too small and too cruel to be real. This autumn the man behind that boy, now in his mid-eighties, received the literature prize of Korea’s National Academy of Arts, the kind of honour that usually arrives once everyone agrees on what a career meant. With Lee that agreement has been slow to come, and his books suggest he was never in a hurry.

The displacement in his fiction starts with his own. Lee was born in Osaka while Korea was still a Japanese colony, and his family crossed back after liberation and settled in Gyeongsan, in North Gyeongsang Province, where he grew up. His legal name is Lee Yong; the name on his books is the one he took when he began to publish. He studied creative writing at Seorabeol College of Arts, then Korean literature at Konkuk University.

He came in through the front door of Korean letters, the newspaper spring contests. In 1966 the Seoul Shinmun chose his short story Jeonjaenggwa daramjwi (“War and Squirrel”), and within a year he had won two more open calls, among them the first full-length novel competition run by the journal Hyundae Munhak, with Uulhan gwihyang (“Melancholy Homecoming”). The early pieces stayed close to the war. In the 1970s, while he worked at magazines and university newspapers, he moved to the city and its salaried men in books such as Morae (“Sand”) and Dosiui neup (“City Swamp”), where the damage is quieter and mostly internal.

Toy City grew out of three linked novellas published between 1979 and 1982. The second, “The Hungry Soul,” won the Korean Creative Writing Award in 1981, and when Moonji gathered all three into one volume in 1982 the book took the first award given by the Korean Literary Critics Association. It is openly autobiographical. Yun’s father, a respected figure in the small town the family is forced to leave, turns into a fumbling stranger in the city; food becomes something to be afraid of; the classroom thugs who beat the boy end up protecting him. Lee keeps every scene inside the child’s partial understanding, and that is where the book gets its force.

Through the 1980s he pushed the subject of violence into the open. The story “Shrapnel” brought him the Korean Literary Writer Award in 1983, and Pongnyeok yeongu (“A Study of Violence”) won the Hyundae Munhak Award in 1986. These are stories of individual lives caught between war and dictatorship, watched at close range and told in short, exact sentences. What they hold back is the verdict. Lee rarely raises his voice against his characters’ tormentors or steps in to explain them, and his endings stay open, leaving judgment to the person holding the book.

That restraint is also why he is easy to underrate abroad. When the first novella of Toy City appeared on its own in English in 2003 in Jimoondang’s Portable Library of Korean Literature, the critic Charles Montgomery found it crowded with subplots and symbols that never seemed to connect, and concluded that “Lee tries too hard.” The complete translation by Chi-Young Kim, published by Koryo Press in 2007, gave English readers the whole arc for the first time, and LTI Korea presents it as a key book for understanding how the war reached into everyday life and the lower classes of 1950s Korea. Kim would later bring Shin Kyung-sook’s Please Look After Mom into English.

The short fiction found a warmer welcome. Shrapnel and Other Stories, translated by Hyun-jae Yee Sallee for White Pine Press in 2002, collects pieces such as “The Blazing Sun,” in which children at play stumble on a bull killed by stray military gunfire. Kirkus called the book “Stark, challenging, memorable: the work of a superb literary talent,” and described Lee as “a seasoned Korean writer whom American readers will want to know more about.” In English his shelf still holds little more than those two titles. Toy City has travelled further, with Vietnamese and Chinese editions in 2013 and an Arabic translation, and a story of his appeared in German in the 2021 anthology Friedensmorgen.

He taught at Mokpo National University and then in the creative writing department of Chung-Ang University until he retired, and he has chaired the Korean Novelists’ Association and led the society that honours the novelist Kim Dong-ri. The prizes kept coming in later decades: the first O Yeong-su Literature Award in 1993, the Mu-yeong Literature Award in 2008, the Yosan Literature Award and, in 2013, the Bogwan Order of Cultural Merit. His later books include the novel Naenghokhan hyeo, the collections Mun apeseo and Ureonggaksineun alkka, and a first volume of essays, Sesangsarigwa soseolsseugi, a look back at lean early years.

The Academy prize puts a formal seal on all of it. The National Academy of Arts named him winner of its 71st award for literature on June 26, 2026, and the ceremony took place at the Academy in Seoul on September 7. The prize carries 50 million won. Korean coverage of the award summed up his work as fiction about the scars of division and war, and the people left behind by modernization, written in a realistic and meticulous style, and named Morae and Barameui jip (“The House of Wind”) among his major books.

That description fits, but it leaves out the child. Lee’s most lasting move was to hand the country’s hardest decades to a narrator too young to judge them, and then to trust readers to do the judging themselves. For anyone outside Korea, the way in is still Yun, standing at the edge of a city that looks like a toy and behaves like anything but.

Tags: novelists, writers, Park Jin-young, Lee Dong-ha, Korean literature, Shrapnel and Other Stories