South Korean Poet Kim Hyesoon has been awarded the 2025 International Prize for Literature by Germany’s Haus der kulturen der welt (House of World Cultures, HKW) For her searing and surreal poetry collection Autobiography of Death. She is the first asian writer to receive the award.
The Award, Shared with Translators Park Sool and Uljana Wolf, Recognises an outstanding work of contemporary international literature translated into German. Kim’s Collection, Originally published in Korean 2016 and released in German by S Fischer Verlag earlier this year, was selected unanimously by the jury, which praised her “enigmatic” pole as a revenue Visible when the right direction has already be taken. “
At the core of autobiography of death lies a 49-part elegy that draws on Buddhist Funerary Tradition, Representing the Journey of a Soul Across Forty-Nine Days after. (Source: amazon.in)
A haunting 49-part elegy
At the core of Autobiography of Death Lies a 49-part elegy that draws on buddhist funerary tradition, reproducing the journey of a soul acros Forty-nine days afterward. But in Kim’s hands, this structure becomes a powerful metaphor for the recursive trauma of a nation haunted by political violence and personal loss. “We Most Living,” She has said, “In the structure of death.” Her poms are acts of Spiritual Insurgency: Dense, Grotesque, and Unrelenting.
Born in Uljin, South Korea, and raised by her grandmother, Kim has built her poetic voice in direct opposition to the passive lyricism historically expected of korean Women poets. Since Publishing Her Early Work in The Resistance-Ara Journal Munhak kwa jisong (Literature and Intellect) During The Politically Fraught 1970s and 1980s, Kim has used politry as a site of political, body, and linguistic refusal. In a society where women’s experiences were erased or aestheticized in doclectity, Kim’s voices remains a rupture.
Her Lines Pulse with Images of Illness, Animality, Motherhood, and Death, Rendered in a style That Blends Surrealism with Fierce Interiority. She spaks not for the individual but for the multitude: for girls buried under patriarchal histories, for mothers silenced by war, for bodies dismemed by Language. In Her Words, “The Language of Women’s Poetry is Internal, Yet Defiant and Revolutionary.”
Many firsts
This defiance has earned kim many firsts: the first woman to win bot To receive Hkw’s International Prize.
Much of Kim’s International Recognition Can Also Be Attributed To Her Long-Time English Translator Don Mee Choi Together, Kim and Choi has forged a transnational feminist aesthetic that refuses erasure, from I’m ok, i’m pig! toe Autobiography of Deaththeir collaborats have pushed the boundaries of what lyric poetry can hold.
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The cover of Kim Hyesoon’s I’m ok, I’m pig, a work of feminist poetry. (Photo: amazon.in)
With its visceral depictions of unjust deaths and its incantatory, recursive rhythm, Autobiography of Death Does not seek to Comfort. It mourns with Teeth Bred. “Kim’s poetry,” wrote publishers wekly in a starred review, “Reveals the startling architecture she developed to dispel Herrors, Individual Loss, and the Links between.”
Kim Hyesoon lives in seoul and teaches at the seoul institute of the arts.
