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Selected biography 1
Portal:North Korea/Selected biography/1
Selected biography 2
Portal:North Korea/Selected biography/2
Selected biography 3
Portal:North Korea/Selected biography/3
Selected biography 4
Portal:North Korea/Selected biography/4
Regarded as one of the most important fiction writers in North Korean history, Han also ran the entire North Korean literary scene as the head of the Korean Writers' Union and minister of education. During his career, Han survived a number of purges that were caused by factional strife within the Workers' Party. Sometimes acting as the force behind the purges within the cultural establishment, Han was also motivated by personal grievances against his rival writers. Han offered some of the earliest known contributions to the cult of personality of Kim Il-sung.
Han himself was purged in 1962. His influence is felt in North Korea even today, though his name has been forgotten from official histories. Han's best known work, the anti-American Jackals, however has been invoked in the 2000s. (Full article...)
Selected biography 5
Portal:North Korea/Selected biography/5 Jo Ki-chon (조기천; 6 November 1913 – 31 July 1951) was a Russian-born North Korean poet. He is regarded as "a founding father of North Korean poetry" whose distinct Soviet-influenced style of lyrical epic poetry became an important feature of North Korean literature. He was nicknamed "Korea's Mayakovsky" after the writer whose works had had an influence on him and which implied his breaking from literature of the old society and his commitment to communist values. After a remark made by Kim Jong-il on his 2001 visit to Russia, North Korean media has referred to Jo as the "Pushkin of Korea".
Jo was dispatched by the Soviet authorities to liberated Korea when the Red Army entered in 1945. By that time, he had much experience of Soviet literature and literature administration. The Soviets hoped that Jo would shape the cultural institutions of the new state based on the Soviet model. For the Soviets, the move was successful and Jo did not only that but also significantly developed socialist realism as it would become the driving force of North Korean literature and arts.
Jo offered some of the earliest contributions to Kim Il-sung's cult of personality. His most famous work is Mt. Paketu (1947), a lyrical epic praising Kim Il-sung's guerrilla activities and promoting him as a suitable leader for the new North Korean state. (Full article...)
Selected biography 6
Portal:North Korea/Selected biography/6
Under his leadership, North Korea became a socialist state and had close political and economic relations with the Soviet Union which gave the country many similarities in those respects. By the 1960s and 1970s, North Korea enjoyed a relatively high standard of living, outperforming the South which was crippled by political instability and economic crises. (Full article...)