VOL.99/2026.10

Korean Authors

 

Sung Haena, a Shining Icon of Korean Fiction

 

 

2026.09

 

 

Sung Haena is a rising star in Korean fiction today. Known for meticulous research and finely crafted structure, she has won the devotion of countless readers. Her body of work includes Honmono, along with Human, Not Human, The Summer Left Behind, When We Are Born and Die Ten Times Over, and Light Underneath Light. Celebrities have recommended her books, and readers have embraced her work in droves. We reached out to Sung Haena to hear her thoughts on writing and on the kind of storytelling our society has come to love.

 

 

 

 

 

Q. Please introduce yourself as a writer and tell us what led you to writing.

 

Hello, I'm Sung Haena, and I write fiction. I think of a writer as someone who suffers through the growing pains of their era alongside everyone else, and I've been trying to write with that in mind, as steadily as I can.

 

If there's a single spark or catalyst behind my writing, I think it's society, and the people in it. While going through old notebooks from high school, I once came across something I'd written back then, a line about wanting to write fiction where “society” and “those pushed to its margins” meet. It read, “I stop in my tracks when I see people who've been pushed aside. The media calls them pitiable, but they aren't simply people who cower and shrink. I want to make them into characters who are truly alive on the page.”

 

I think that impulse traces back to figures like labor activist Jeon Tae-il, and to works like Cho Se-hui's The Dwarf and Yi Cheong-jun's The Falconer. For a long time, I've wanted to capture the problems of Korean society, and the people living through them, in a way that's sharp and unflinching. Through that, I also wanted to look squarely at, or sometimes upend, the things we tend to view with condescending sympathy, or simply take as given.

 

 

 

 

 

Q. Your fiction is known for its unique ideas and meticulous storytelling. I'm curious whether you have your own method for finding material for your novels.

 

I write with my physical presence. So when I need to, I go out and do fieldwork, conduct interviews. I actually prefer staying home, so going out takes a lot out of me, but once I've gone and explored the actual spaces in a story, the range of what I can write about widens. I end up embodying a life I never got to live myself.

 

Fieldwork matters, but so does indirect experience. I lean heavily on nonfiction books and academic papers too. When I was writing a short story called “Go,” I read old medical texts like the Compendium of Materia Medica and the Dongui Bogam (Principles and Practices of Eastern Medicine), since the main character is a doctor of Korean medicine. Reading with a learner's attitude, with humility, that seems to become a kind of sturdy sinew running through the work.

 

 

 

 

 

Q. Several of your novels currently hold firm positions on the bestseller charts. What do you think it is about your fiction that readers love so much?

 

I suppose it might be because each of my characters has their own distinct texture. Some are rough, some delicate, some blunt, some sharp. But I think they're all alike in being imperfect human beings, and that's probably what lets them reach such a wide range of readers. I'm grateful that people have taken to them. I feel like I need to push myself further as a writer.

 

 

 

 

Q. Could you tell us about a topic you'd like to write about in the future, and share a message for our subscribers?

 

 

There's so much I'm drawn to that it's hard to name just one, but I do have a strong desire to write a rural narrative. I lived in the countryside for a long time, so I care a great deal about the life and culture there. I'm someone who lived in a rural area myself and felt firsthand the gap between ideals and reality. I think everyone, in their own way, has an instinct to return to where they came from. That's why so many people move back to their hometowns, and why so many settle there for good. I suppose that's why I want to write a rural narrative too. Most Korean novels are set in Seoul, and stories set in the countryside are rare. Because of that, I feel drawn to capturing more of the problems and the ideals that exist in rural life.

 

Lastly, just as some of you have followed my novels, I imagine there are readers following this piece as well. It may sound presumptuous, but I often think literature can save a person's life. Listening all the way through to someone's story, and not twisting their choices into something else, that alone can give someone the strength to keep living. I've lived that way myself, and I think we're all reading and writing in that spirit, pushing back against the world's easy assumptions, trying, however we can, to understand people who seem impossible to understand.

 

That's why readers always matter so much. A story can only fulfill its purpose when readers step into the gaps left by a writer's imagination, filling them in, putting flesh on the bones of the story, and coming to understand its characters down to the last detail. We live in an age that questions the very purpose of literature, but I remain hopeful that the very act of reading and understanding is literature's use, and its power. I believe our tomorrow lives inside that process, painful as it is, of willingly digging into the emotions and memories society has chosen to overlook.

 

With deep gratitude and love for everyone who reads this...

 

 

 

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Interview with Sung Haena (Writer)

She made her literary debut in 2019 through the Dong-a Ilbo New Year's Literary Contest. She has published the story collections Light Underneath Light, Honmono, and Human, Not Human, as well as the novella The Summer Left Behind.