Who Ate Up All the Shinga?: An Autobiographical Novel

Park Wan-suh; Translated by Yu Young-nan and Stephen Epstein

August, 2009
Cloth, 264 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-14898-6
$24.50 / £17.00

"Lyrical in its descriptions of village life, this gripping book is written with a confessional chattiness that contrasts with the hardships it describes." — Financial Times

"Park Wan-suh is important for the ways in which her writing is at once popular (nearly all her works are best-sellers) and canonical. She is widely discussed in Korean academia, and she has become the subject of a number of dissertations. While this is also the case for many male writers, Park Wan-suh may have combined the two levels more successfully than any other novelist. Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is the embodiment of one of these works." — Theodore Hughes, Columbia University

"Park Wan-suh is a household name in Korea and draws standing-room-only crowds in North American cities with substantial Korean populations. Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is a major work, being both a rare account of a woman coming of age in colonial Korea and the first book-length memoir in English by a Korean writer resident in and writing about Korea." — Bruce Fulton, University of British Columbia, and cotranslator of There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch'oe Yun

Related Subjects

• Asian History
• Asian Literature
• East Asian Studies

Series

• Weatherhead Books on Asia

About the Author

Park Wan-suh broke into Korea's literary scene in the 1970s and in 1981 received the prestigious Yi Sang award for her novel Mother's Stake. Her prolific career includes more than 150 short stories and novellas and close to twenty novels, many of which have topped best-seller lists and have been adapted for the screen. Her works in translation include My Very Last Possession and The Naked Tree. Yu Young-nan is a freelance translator living in Seoul. She has translated five Korean novels into English, including Park Wan-suh's The Naked Tree and Yom Sang-seop's Three Generations. Yu was awarded the Daesan Literature Prize for her translation of Yi In-hwa's Everlasting Empire. Stephen J. Epstein is the director of the Asian Studies Programme at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. His research focuses on contemporary Korean literature and society, and he is currently working on a book exploring Korean national identity in relation to globalization. He has also published several translations of Korean and Indonesian fiction.

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