Cho Sung-ki was born March 30, 1951, in Goseong, Gyeongsangnam-do, South Korea. He attended Busan Middle School and Gyeonggi High School where he put himself through a strenuous self-training period reading nearly a thousand pieces of fiction, literary criticism and poetry while teaching himself grammar by hand-copying an entire grammar book. Cho also struggled with his sexual urges and found some refuge in religion. Cho entered Seoul National University and graduated with a degree in Law. He also received a graduate degree from Presbyterian Divinity School. He made his literary debut in 1971, winning the New Spring Literary Contest sponsored by The Dong-a Ilbo with a short story called “Kaleidoscope”, but remained virtually silent for the next fourteen years.
Work
Cho's literature, both novels and short stories, focus on the revelation of shameful personal aspects, a feature of his work that is interesting because his works also have an autobiographical nature. Cho made his literary debut in 1971, winning the New Spring Literary Contest sponsored by The Dong-a Ilbo with a short story called “Kaleidoscope”, but remained virtually silent for the next fourteen years. In 1985, he broke this silence with “Lahateuhaherep” and the work received the year's Today's Writer Prize. Since then, Cho Seonggi's literary output has been steady. He has received 1986 Christian Cultural Prize for The Night of Yahweh, and 1991 Lee Sang Literature Prize for “A Fiction-Writer in Our Time”. What underlies much of Cho's diverse fictional works is the sense of human life as confined. This confinement may take shape of political oppression as in "Buril Waterfall", or cultural violence as in "A Shaman in Our Time". Then again, one might be ensnared in one's own web of ambition; the novel A Crow's Eye View of Desire develops this theme using a sustained allusion to Lee Sang's famed series of poems. The novel, however, also offers a release from the confinement that is the fundamental condition of existence through violent outbursts of erotic energy. The novel Love in Our Time also presents eroticism as the vital mechanism for the free release of inner life. Thus, eroticism, as well as humor and the juxtaposition of subjective interpretation and objective facts, are the main techniques Cho uses in his attempts to challenge human confinement.
