VOL.99/2026.10

A Thriving Metamorphosis of Queer Literature

The growth and prospects of Korean queer literature

2025.09.04

Refreshing history: joining hands with feminism

The queerness of Korean literature continues to reach new heights. Recent works published in literary magazines, almost without exception, embody a feminist consciousness and a queer-friendly stance. Novels that feature gay, lesbian, and transgender characters as central figures are also steadily on the rise. Of course, whether a work can be called “queer literature” simply because its characters are named and categorized as queer remains a question that requires ongoing reflection. Over the past ten years, however, the demographic composition of the literary world created by Korean literature has gradually shifted from cisgender heterosexuals to characters where queerness, disability, and feminism intersect. Given that the visibility of queer identities begins with individual identity, this shift is certainly an important indicator of queerness in Korean literature.
The full-fledged opening of Korean queer literature came with the appearance of autofiction novels?works that combined autobiography and fiction, foregrounding first-person gay male narrators. Two direct catalysts sparked this: first, the works of Kim Bong-Gon and Park Sang-Young, who have officially begun to release novels since 2016, were introduced to general readers; and second, the intense transformation within the literary field was triggered by the hashtag movement “#SexualViolenceInLiteraryCircle,” which began in the fall of 2016. This was a sweeping exposure of sexual violence long perpetrated openly by male writers, starting earlier than the “#MeToo” movement against film producer Harvey Weinstein in the United States in 2017.¹⁾ Gay fiction was a hopeful force to cleanse the corruption of violent masculinity that the Korean literary establishment had expelled and to generate a new future from that very site.²⁾

Fiction, the core driving force of queer literature in Korea

From the mid-2010s onward, with an explosive increase in the number of queer characters in fiction, a group of writers emerged who made queerness the very focus of their creative work. For example, while Park Sang-Young, Kim Bong-Gon, Park Sun-Woo, Kim Byung-Woon, and Dol Ki-Min highlight the lives of contemporary gay youth, writers such as Kim Hye-Jin, Kim Mella, Kim Ji-Yeon, and Cho Si-Hyeon focus on the love and desire of lesbian youth. When transgender identity intersects with fiction, the most notable name that comes to mind is undoubtedly Seo Jang-Won. “Queer” functions not only as an identity that drives a character’s desire, but also as an element that shapes class and gives meaning to the subject’s existence in the world. Fiction, as a genre, reproduces this with high resolution on the textual surface.
Kim Hye-Jin’s short story collection Life Called You (Munhakdongne Publishing) demonstrates how lesbian relationships extend into layers of conflict over housing difficulties and class struggle among young people. Further, it reveals, through neighborhood discord, the acute socio-economic marginalization faced by queer young women in local communities. A distinctive feature of this collection is that all of the stories are written from a second-person perspective, addressing “you.” The narrative shapes characters, events, and time-space through the gaze of lesbian subjects, while never overlooking the fact that such a gaze is always a co-construct generated within relationships. Kim Hye-Jin’s lesbian first-person narrators, who can only speak within entanglement with the “you,” reveal that queerness is not the atomized individual but an identity and value discovered within the social matrix of others and shared values.

Kim Ji-Yeon’s narratives twist the vector of social and political class dynamics among queer youth, shifting it from the public sphere into the private. As evident from the titles, her collections, Words Without Heart (Munhakdongne Publishing) and A Little Failed Love (Munhakdongne Publishing), vividly depict the hardships and suffering of lesbian youth living in a neoliberal age already “ruined” (Pet Debt); the female characters confront the norms of family units rooted in Korea’s Confucian patriarchy. Rather than offering overt political or moral criticism of these systems, the fiction focuses on the complex emotions and inner conflicts of individual women as they navigate these circumstances.
Kim Mella rises gradually from the position where Kim Hye-Jin and Kim Ji-Yeon carefully politicize the internal and external struggles of young Korean lesbians, and dashes forward with humor toward a rainbow-hued future of hope. Her stories embody the youngest sensibility of Korean lesbian fiction, and indeed its future. Her debut short story collection, At Least Twice (Jaeum & Moeum Publishing), features, among others, an intersex teenager exploring Itaewon and discovering the multicolored world alongside its queer inhabitants (Dance Me Hormone), as well as a story of two women, immersed in the disparate worlds of fortune-telling and physics, who come together in love (The Material Universe). Her second short story collection, Dream About Me (Munhakdongne Publishing), reflects an ambitious desire to reimagine private queer narratives as belonging to the universal realm. Particularly noteworthy is The Evening Glow, which formally parodies the classical gajeonche tradition (fictional biography of personified objects). Through the “rewriting” of this conventional narrative form, it elevates the life of a lesbian?one of the most contemporary figures of Korean society?into literary text. The work is an anthropological record: a participant-observation of a lesbian couple, written by a personified sex toy that is at once humorous and tragic.

Cho Si-Hyeon’s debut collection, How To Weigh Cream (Moonji Publishing), excels at portraying a twenty-first-century vision of the lesbian continuum, oscillating between conscious reality and unconscious surrealism, and between Earth and the cosmos. The title story, How To Weigh Cream, depicts a provocative post-human scenario in which the soul is extracted and downloaded into an artificial “human suit.” Meanwhile, in Into the Grave, two sisters embody both the taboos of homosexuality and incest in a world of radical lesbianism where even the need for “coming out” is nullified. Also, the book, Anna, is the story of lesbian “Antigone” struggling to give her lover a proper funeral in a dystopian Earth dominated by plastic.

In The 16th Anthology of Award-Winning Young Authors (Munhakdongne Publishing), Seo Jang-Won’s short story, Little Pride, stands out as the most multidimensional transgender narrative in Korean literature today. The FTM (Female-To-Male) style portrayed in the novel is set in contrast to cisgender men who re-inscribe themselves into male-centered order by overcoming femininity. This reminds us that not only transgender bodies, but all individual bodies, are material ones, embodied in contention with sociocultural contexts. It is also an allegory of how queer bodies come into being. In Seo Jang-Won’s literary world, queer is not merely a name of identity. In fact, “name” is the last consideration, even one that could remain blank. Similarly, in his first short story collection, The Story You Don’t Know (Dasan Books), the lesbian and FTM characters are not immediately identifiable from the reader’s perspective. What the narrative attends to are the gazes and sensations beyond identity, and the complex implications of what they have said and left unsaid.

The globalization of Korean queer fiction

The most widely recognized author and work in Korea would be Park Sang-Young’s serial novel, Love In The Big City (Changbi Publishers). Long-listed for the 2022 International Booker Prize, the novel has also been adapted into film and drama, demonstrating vividly the popular appeal of queer fiction as a genre. Yet beneath the surface lies a much broader and more diverse terrain. Kim Bong-Gon’s debut short story collection, Summer, Speed (Munhakdongne Publishing), followed by Moments And Feelings (Changbi Publishers) portray, respectively, young gay men burning with the heat of eros and a nostalgia suffused with longing. At a time when many recent Korean novels restrict themselves to platonic love, his queer eros adds a distinctive beauty to Korean literature. Meanwhile, the works of Park Sun-Woo and Kim Byung-Woon present a new mode in which lyricism, long regarded as a quintessential quality of Korean poetry, comes to be embodied within the world of fiction.

Park Sun-Woo’s first short story collection, We, In the Same Place (Jaeum & Moeum Publishing), captures with sensitivity and nuance, the subtle, complex emotions that queers experience across different relationships?those elusive “somethings” that cannot be confined to a single word or sentence. If Park Sun-Woo portrays others and the world as understood through the gaze of queer subjects, Kim Byung-Woon depicts with clarity the moments when queers perceive and comprehend the blind spots of others and the world that they had previously overlooked. The lingering resonance from his first short story collection, Things We Say When We Wait (Minumsa Publishing), arises from the belated understanding felt through queer characters as they come to perceive the world anew.

Meanwhile, Park Sun-Woo’s recently published first full-length novel, Piercing The Darkness (Munhakdongne Publishing), is an autobiographical narrative that conveys the frustration and ambivalence of repeatedly failing to understand one’s parent (the mother). This work forms a pair with Kim Hye-Jin’s novel, About Daughter (Minumsa Publishing). Whereas Piercing The Darkness focuses tightly on the perspective of the eldest son, a gay novelist, looking toward his mother, About Daughter narrates from the opposite perspective: the story of a mother’s process of trying to understand her lesbian daughter and her daughter’s partner. About Daughter was adapted into a film of the same title in 2024³⁾; another example of lesbian fiction adapted into a visual work is the animated film based on Choi Eun-Young’s short story, The Summer, included in A Person Harmless To Me (Munhakdongne Publishing).⁴⁾

Having outlined the main currents along which contemporary Korean queer fiction has developed, I would like to conclude by introducing three works that must not be overlooked. First, Hwang Jung-Eun’s serial novel, Didi’s Umbrella (Changbi Publishers), captures the perspective of a person who experienced the Sewol ferry tragedy in 2014 and the impeachment of former president Park Geun-Hye in 2016. It offers a multifaceted reflection on the political turmoil of contemporary Korean society, on misogyny, and on queer-phobia.
Second, Dol Ki-Min’s full-length novel, Practicing How to Walk (EunHaengNaMu Publishing), and third, Kim Mella’s full-length novel, The Book of Mirth (Hyundae Munhak), each adopt the perspectives of man-eating aliens and insects, enabling readers to experience how “queer” can exceed anthropocentrism and access nonhuman worlds. Practicing How to Walk, whose rights were sold abroad even before its publication in Korea, won the Otherwise Award this year, making the author the first Korean winner. Established in 1991 in honor of SF writer James Tiptree, Jr., the Otherwise Award is given to writers whose work explores and expands the concept of gender.
The Book of Mirth is itself remarkable for its bold and joyful meta-generic and historical challenge: can a literary narrator surpass the exclusive position of the human? If the world envisioned by queer fiction is itself queer, then the language of its narratives and their materiality must also be renewed in queer ways. The Book of Mirth brings us to precisely that futuristic point.

The evolution of queer poetry in Korea

Queer literature in Korea has been most active in the genre of fiction, for good reason that within a narrative, multiple identities?including queer and other forms of difference?can be presented simultaneously through a variety of characters. While fiction has been shaped by the identities abbreviated as LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning), poetry flows queerly at the level of the verb. Beginning with the poetic world presented by Hwang In-Chan in the 2010s, Korean literature has, since the 2020s, more fully established “queer poetry” as a distinct genre.
In his recent collection, Let’s Suppose That This Is My Heart (Munhakdongne Publishing), writer Hwang In-Chan identifies his speaker more explicitly as gay. Yet in earlier poetry collections such as Washing a Common Hill Myna (Minumsa Publishing) and A Rewind For Love (Changbi Publishers), he expressed queer love more broadly by using the general dimensions of pronouns like “you,” “I,” and “he.” Following this lineage, the younger poet Song Hee-Ji continues the genealogy of gay speakers in Glowing Sugar (Moonji Publishing) and Synchronized Swimming (Paran Book), actively representing the hot pathos of love and desire through diverse formal experiments and cinematic visualization devices.
At the same time, when poetry is not tethered to the names of identities, queer love and queer lives paradoxically become even freer. For example, Cho Si-Hyeon’s poetry collection, Idle Time (Moonji Publishing), presents cosmic queerness as it swims across the spectrum of the lesbian continuum through sisterly and female relationships, much like the worlds in her novels. Also, Baek Seoli’s Cat Scratch (Munhakdeul) depicts how, even within such a dystopia, the love between women can itself become the greatest force of resistance capable of preventing the destruction of the world.

Lee Je-Jae’s Glassed Eyes (Achimdal Books) is a queer poetry collection so filled with unusual rays of light that it could be called poetic fiction. The speaker, who grew up enduring the pain first experienced as a queer adolescent, portrays her reflections on her body in relation to others as fragile as glass. Yet, the speaker in Glassed Eyes deeply accepts this fragility as her very life. Also, Kim Seon-Oh’s The Set (Moonji Publishing) and Syncopation (ASIA) demonstrate how poetic language and thought can enter a non-binary dimension, surpassing the narrator’s concerns of identity or desire. As queer identity transcends the boundaries of gender identity to become a philosophical idea, the hybrid animality of nonhuman subjects found in Shin Yi-In’s A Dictionary of Black-Haired Animals (Minumsa Publishing) allows us to escape binary sexual distinctions. Historical works that serve as ancestors to these queer poems include Chae Ho-Ki’s A Sad Gay (Moonji Publishing) and Hwang Byung-Seung’s Shikoku, Dressed as a Woman (Random House Korea).⁵⁾

The vitality of criticism and the emergence of publishing houses specialized in queer works

As poetry and fiction have become more queer, so too has criticism. Critical works have not only approached these texts in queer ways but have also taken “queer” itself as a primary subject, appearing as full-length volumes. For example, Oh Hye-Jin’s Awfully Literary Taste (May Book) examines queer fiction and popular culture texts that can be reread in the course of a meta-reflection on Korean literary history. Also, Kim Kun-Hyung’s We Invent Love (Munhakdongne Publishing) marks the beginning of critical inquiry into gay fiction and the devices of autofiction. Moreover, Jeon Seung-Min’s Queer (Po)etica (Munhakdongne Publishing) critically illuminates the blind spots of Korean queer literature, which has often been represented solely by gay fiction, and undertakes a wide-ranging exploration of queerness across both poetry and fiction.

Publishing houses dedicated exclusively to queer literature have also emerged. Publishing house QQ Books releases one anthology each year in its QQ Queer Short Story Collection series and, through its QQ Classics series, has introduced translations of queer works that stand as part of the literary canon both in Korea and abroad?those by authors such as Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Vita Sackville-West, Mikhail Kuzmin, Yukio Mishima, and Ji Ha-Ryeon. Also, Oomzicc Publisher, well known for bringing Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel series into Korean translation, has published not only literary works but also a wide range of queer-feminist texts, including Audre Lorde’s poetry collections and Nancy Fraser’s writings. Most recently, the company translated and published a novel by Taiwanese lesbian writer Qiu Miaojin (邱妙津), and actively showcased it at the 2025 Seoul International Book Fair (SIBF), where Taiwan was invited as Guest of Honor.
Korean queer literature, sparked by the feminist movements in the literary field of the 2010s, is now experiencing explosive growth. This expansion is not confined to fiction, but extends deeply into poetry, criticism, translation, and publishing. Korean literature, constantly transforming from patriarchy, heterosexuality, and male-centeredness, now faces itself head-on in order to present the queer face that only Korea can reveal. Our future has already arrived in a queer world.

References

Written by Jeon Seung-Min (Literary critic)