[3] Widely considered to be one of the most outstanding writers to have emerged in South Korea after the political repression of the 1980s,[4] he is today a professor of Korean literature at Chosun University.
[2] Lee Seung-u's literary career started with his novel A Portrait of Erysichton, inspired by his shock at the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981.
[6] Other works, including A Conjecture Regarding Labyrinth and To the Outside of the World face up to disillusionment pursuant to the corruption and devaluation of language.
During his year-long stay in Korea as a visiting professor at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, he held book readings with Korean authors on several occasions.
At the press conference after the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony, he stated that “Korean literature is quite worthy of the Nobel Literature Prize,” and that “Personally, I would say that Lee Seung-u is one of the likely Korean candidates for the prize.”[7] Among Lee Seung-u's works, only full-length novels have been translated into English and French, although he has published a great number of short story collections in the past three decades, due in part to the climate of the Korean literary world in which a writer's capacity is evaluated mostly through short stories published in literary journals.