December 30, 2025
SEOUL – A year after Han Kang’s historic Nobel Prize win in literature, Korean writers and translators continued to land nominations and awards across major global literary prizes throughout 2025. At home, even as the broader publishing market struggled, Korean fiction emerged as a rare source of optimism, buoyed by younger readers and a new generation of writers.
In January, Bora Chung was named a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, marking the first time a Korean writer had been shortlisted for the prize. Although she did not take home the award, “Your Utopia” was the only work in translation among the six finalists.
Established in 1983, the Philip K. Dick Award honors distinguished science fiction works published in paperback original form in the United States during the previous calendar year.
“Your Utopia” brings together eight stories. Its title story opens on an abandoned planet, where a malfunctioning humanoid strikes up a conversation with a sentient smart car that has been drifting through space with it. The collection, Chung said in a previous interview with The Korea Herald, delves more deeply into science fiction themes than her International Booker–shortlisted “Cursed Bunny,” using speculative narratives to probe questions of humanity and ethics.
Poetry, too, found global recognition.
In September, Kim Hye-soon was awarded the International Prize for Literature for her poetry collection “Autobiography of Death,” becoming the first Asian recipient of the German literary award presented by the House of World Cultures (HKW). It was translated into German by Park Sool and Uljana Wolf.
Originally published in 2016, “Autobiography of Death” is composed of 49 poems shaped by the poet’s sudden collapse at a subway station in 2015, as well as her meditations on collective trauma, including the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster and the 2015 MERS outbreak.
The collection had already attracted international attention in its English translation by Choi Don-mee, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize in Canada in 2019, making Kim the first Korean poet to receive the award.
In November, the poet Lee Su-myeong was awarded the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize for her poetry collection “Just Like,” translated into English by Colin Leemarshall.
Judges said, “In supple, glitchy lyrics, Lee … explores language’s quicksilver oddity, a material which, like light, is both particle and wave, structure and fluid.”
Established in 2010 in honor of the American poet and translator Lucien Stryk, the prize is awarded annually to recognize outstanding translations of Asian poetry published in English. This year’s honor marked the fifth time a work by a Korean poet has received the award, following earlier wins by Kim Hye-soon (twice), Kim Yi-deum and Lee Young-ju.
Korean fiction boom fueled by younger readers, writers
The Korean publishing industry in 2025 can be summed up simply, industry insiders say: the rise of Korean fiction.
The publishing market as a whole has struggled, but fiction proved a notable exception. Since last year, the rise of the so-called “text-hip” trend, an embrace of reading and writing as a cultural statement, has helped usher in what many in the industry describe as a modest revival.
Much of the momentum followed Han’s Nobel Prize in October 2024, which renewed interest in her novels and helped draw readers back to bookstores. At the same time, a handful of new releases performed strongly, offering rare bright spots in an otherwise cautious market, said an official at the Korea Publishing Marketing Research Institute.
According to data from the Publication Industry Promotion Agency of Korea, which operates the country’s integrated publishing distribution network, sales of fiction showed a marked increase this year. From January through September, 6.4 million copies of novels were sold, up from 5.2 million during the same period last year — an increase of 23 percent.
Even excluding the unusual spike in October, when monthly sales reached 2.05 million copies following the Nobel announcement, fiction sales remained elevated. By comparison, average monthly sales rose to 710,000 copies from January through September this year, up from 580,000 over the same period in 2024.
Reports show that much of that growth was driven by Korean fiction. Yes24, the country’s largest online bookseller, said that even excluding Han’s works, sales in the fiction, poetry and drama categories rose 4 percent year over year. Within that figure, Korean novels and Korean poetry saw strong gains — up 19.5 percent and 7.3 percent, respectively.
Insiders noted qualitative changes in the readership. While women in their 30s and 40s have long been considered the core audience for literary fiction, younger female readers in their teens and 20s are now joining them in significant numbers.
Kyobo Book Center summarized this year’s trend by saying that “books chosen by readers in their 20s have taken off,” and the popularity of Korean fiction was especially pronounced among this age group. On Kyobo’s 2025 bestseller list, “Contradiction” by Yang Gui-ja ranked No. 2 overall with 39.2 percent of its purchases from readers in their 20s, while “The Torrent” by Jung Dae-eun ranked No. 5, drawing 40.1 percent from the same cohort.
Another defining feature of the year was the prominence of writers born in the 1990s. This year’s winners of major Korean literary prizes, including the Yi Sang Literary Award, the Lee Hyo-seok Literary Award and the Shin Dong-yup Literary Award for fiction, were Ye So-yeon (born 1992), Lee Hee-joo (1992) and Sung Hae-na (1994).
Sung’s “Honmono” proved especially popular, ranking fourth on Kyobo’s annual bestseller list. Lee’s “Holy Boy,” a dark novel centered on obsession, fandom and desire, in which four women kidnap a K-pop idol, is set to hit English-language bookstores in February.