Writing from ... (North) Korea

       Korean writing has been increasingly visible in English in recent years (with lots of help from the LTI Korea), with more titles being published in translation -- especially in Dalkey Archive Press' Library of Korean Literature -- and just now there's been a Korea Market Focus at the just-concluded London Book Fair.
       Of course, pretty much all of this is South Korean literature (and the part that's not tends to be pre-divided Korean ...), i.e. there's not much heard or word from North Korea. Insights of any sort remain rare -- see, for example, Sonia Ryang's Reading North Korea -- but it's good to see at least some discussion of the subject around the LBF events.
       At Publishing Perspectives Olivia Snaije reports on Yi Mun-Yol on Allegory and Naked North Korean Writing, as Yi (see my reviews of Our Twisted Hero and The Poet, among others) addressed the subject:

He said there was almost zero literary output coming from North Korea, and that in the case of the few non-fiction books that make their way to South Korea, "even though the language is the same, we can't identify with them. The forms and mechanisms are completely unfamiliar. We feel like we're reading South Korean books from 50 years ago."

       (North Korean non-fiction sounds particularly uninteresting, but surely there's some fiction that trickles out, no ?)
       Apparently speaking about North Korean exiles now writing in the South:

While he finds North Korean authors' stories very interesting, unfortunately South Koreans don't appear to be responsive to what they have to say, remarked Yi Mun-yol.

       Meanwhile, at PEN Atlas Shirley Lee reports on North Korean love poetry (and wouldn't it be great to see an anthology of that stuff ?).