Hwang Sunwon made his literary debut as a middle school student with the publication in 1931 of his poems “My Dream” (Naui kkum) and “Fear Not, My Son” (Adeura museowo malla) in Eastern Light (Donggwang).

[2] Hwang published his first story in 1937 and continued writing through the 1980s; during his long literary career, Hwang Sunwon observed firsthand the suffering of ordinary Koreans under many different forms of oppression: colonialism, ideological strife, Korean War, industrialization, military dictatorships.

[1] Although he wrote many volumes of poetry and eight novels, Hwang achieved his greatest acclaim as the author of short fiction, which was regarded as the premiere literary genre through most of the twentieth century in Korea and Hwang was noted, particularly early in his career, for refusing to write in Japanese.

[1] Hwang began writing novels in the 1950s, his most successful being Trees on a Slope (1960), which depicts the lives of three soldiers during the Korean War.

The Moving Castle (1968–72) depicts the complex and problematic synthesis of Western and indigenous cultures in rapidly modernizing Korea.