Ko Un (born 1 August 1933) is a South Korean poet whose works have been translated and published in more than fifteen countries. He had been imprisoned many times due to his role in the campaign for Korean democracy. Ko is routinely mentioned in Korea as one of the front runners for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Life

Ko Un, born Ko Untae in 1933, was the first child of a peasant family living in Gunsan, North Jeolla Province. During a time when the national culture was being suppressed under the Japanese occupation, his grandfather taught him to read and write in Korean. He had also learned Chinese by the age of 8. When he was 12, he found by chance a book of poems by Han Ha-un, a nomadic Korean poet with leprosy, and was so impressed that he began writing himself.

Ko was still a teenager studying at Gunsan Middle School when the Korean War broke out in 1950. Many of his relatives and friends died and during it he was forced to work as a grave digger. He became so traumatized that he even poured acid into his ear to shut out the war’s noise, leaving him deaf in one ear. Then in 1952 Ko decided to become a Buddhist monk. After a decade of this life, during which he published his first collection of poems, Otherworld Sensibility (Pian Kamsang, 1960), and his first novel, Cherry Tree in Another World (Pain Aeng, 1961), he chose to return to the lay life. From 1963 to 1966 he lived on the remote island of Jeju-do, where he set up a charity school, and then moved back to Seoul. However, dependent on alcohol and not at peace, he attempted to poison himself in 1970.