[1] Kim previously worked as a professor in the Drama School at Korean National University of Arts and on a regular basis hosted a book-themed radio program.

His historical novel Black Flower, which won the Dong-in Literary Award in 2004, tells the story of Korean migrant workers in Mexico later involved in a Pancho Villa-led military uprising.

Sources of inspiration for this novel came from classical Bildungsroman, stories of sea trips as illustrated by the popular film Titanic, ethnography of religion, as well as Korean histories of exile and immigration.

Another instance of Kim's mixed style is found in Your Republic Is Calling You, his fourth novel, in which he raises the question of human identity in a democratic and consumerist Korean society by presenting a North Korean spy and his family in Seoul in the manner of a crime fiction combined with a truncated family saga and naturalist depiction of everyday life.

[1] Featuring a professional suicide assistant as a protagonist, I Have a Right to Destroy Myself pioneers a new realm in the genre of fantasy literature; stories contained in Summoning and What Happened to the Man Caught in the Elevator Door?

tackle computer games, plastic art, cult movies, hostage situations, homosexuality, and other subject matters not commonly explored in Korean literature, which are becoming a part of modern reality.

Kim's stories utilize unfamiliar or even strange settings to explore the by-product of modern capitalism and urban culture, such as alienation and inability to communicate, extreme narcissism and its limitations.

Employing the devices of a detective novel, and at the same time parodying an ancient legend, Why Did Arang reveals that the author's interest in the art of fiction extends beyond mere plot or characterization to the function of narrator and the very definition of storytelling.