Park Wan-suh

Park Wan-suh (; October 20, 1931 – January 22, 2011) was a South Korean writer.

Life Park Wan-suh (also Park Wan-seo, Park Wan-so, Park Wansuh, Pak Wan-so, Pak Wanso) was born in 1931 in Gaepung-gun in what is now Kaesong in North Korea. Park entered Seoul National University, but dropped out almost immediately after attending classes due to the outbreak of the Korean War and the death of her brother. During the war, Park was separated from her mother and elder brother by the North Korea army, which moved them to North Korea. The novelist Jung Yi-hyun wrote in her memorial letter, "You will know how much hope it is for the many female writers that the fact that there is a Park Wan-suh in Korean paragraphs."

Work Park published her first work, The Naked Tree, in 1970, when she was 40. Her œuvre quickly grew however and as of 2007 she had written fifteen novels, and 10 short story collections. Her work is "revered" in Korea and she has won many Korean literary awards including, in 1981 the Yi Sang Literary Prize, in 1990 the Korean Literature award, and in 1994 the Dong-in Literary Award. Park's work centers on families and biting critiques of the middle class.

In terms of general thematic concern, Park's fiction can be divided into three groups. The first deals with the tragic events of Korean War and its aftermath. Many of these stories reflect Park's own experiences. Born October 20, 1931 in Gaepung, Gyeonggi-do (before the division of the country; now Hwanghaebuk-do), Park entered the Korean Literature Department of the prestigious Seoul National University, but the eruption of the Korean War and the death of her older brother cut her studies short. The turbulence of the age she lived through is preserved in such works as The Naked Tree, Warm Was the Winter That Year (Geuhae gyeoureun ttatteuthaennae, 1983), Mother's Stake I (Eommaui malttuk I, 1980), and Mother's Garden (Eommaui tteul, 1981), depictions of families torn apart by the war and the heavy price the war continues to exact from its survivors. The archetypal figure in these works is that of the suffering mother who must make her way through life after losing both her husband and her son during the war. The mother in The Naked Tree, for example, is presented as an empty shell, whose inability to cope with her double loss robs her of the will to live. The place left vacant by the mother within the family must be taken up by her daughter instead; the burden for supporting the family rests squarely on her young shoulders. A certain density that characterizes The Naked Tree'''s prose intensifies the sense of suffocation that pervades the lives of post-war Koreans. While the daughter's active attempts to overcome the ordeal of her life provides a positive contrast to her mother's attitude of resignation, the work nonetheless reveals the severity of the damages, both psychical and material, sustained by the survivors of the war, and the difficulty of achieving genuine healing.

Park's works also target the hypocrisy and materialism of middle-class Koreans. The apartments of identical size, furnishings, and decorations that inscribe just as identical lives intent on gaining material gratification in Identical Apartments (Dalmeun bangdeul, 1974), a marriage of convenience that brings about atrocious results in A Reeling Afternoon (Huicheonggeorineun ohu, 1977), and schools where they prune, rather than educate, children in Children of Paradise'' (Naktoui aideul, 1978) all offer sharp denunciations of a bourgeois society. In these works, acts of individual avarice and snobbery are linked to larger social concerns such as the breakdown of age-old values and dissolution of the family. In turn, these phenomena are found to be symptomatic of the rapid industrialization of society in Korea after 1960s.