Everlasting Empire
A Novel
Yi In-hwa
June 2002 | 296 pages
€5.15 (e-book) | ISBN
978-1-78869-088-1
€12.88 (paperback) | ISBN
978-1-910736-95-1
€21.47 (hardback) | ISBN
978-1-910736-96-8
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Indigo
Everlasting Empire is a Korean historical novel written as a murder mystery. The narrator frames the main story with his “discovery” of a 150-year-old manuscript. Because of problems verifying the authenticity of the manuscript, the narrator offers the book not as genuine history but as a story. This compelling tale is set at a pivotal moment in Korean history, when the nation’s last strong king was attempting to consolidate the authority of the monarchy against the dangerous encumbrance of bureaucratic factional infighting and when Western ideas were beginning to infiltrate Korea. It is an absorbing account of life at a Confucian court. The original Korean edition (1993) was a bestseller in Korea, selling more than one million copies. In was published in French translation (2000) and was made into a feature length film which collected six prestigious Grand Bell Awards.
About the Author
Yi In-hwa is the pen name of You Chul-gun, a professor of Korean Language and Literature at Ewha Womans University in Seoul. He received the first Writers’ World Literature Award for his novel Who Can Say What I Am? in 1992. He is also the recipient of the Korean government’s 1995 Today’s Young Artist Award and the Chinese government’s first Korea-China Youth scholarship award. In 2000, Yi received the prestigious Yi Sang award for his short story “A Poet’s Star.”
Praise
Winner of the 2002 Daesan Foundation Prize for Outstanding Literary Translation
“Beautifully written and riveting…. Aside from being a thrilling mystery story, Everlasting Empire provides non-Korean readers with a glimpse into Korea’s past. It’s perfect for anyone who wants to brush up on their knowledge of Korean history or curl up with a good mystery book on a cold winter day”
— Korea Times
“…the blur and exchange between dichotomies such as dreams and reality, fiction and history, knowledge and ignorance, truth and falsehood, past and present, existence and nonexistence, and, ultimately, what is mutable and immutable is what makes Yi’s storytelling so compelling…. Having read both the English translation and Korean original, I was surprised to find the translation—for which Ms. Yu won the Daesan Foundation prize—more accessible.”
— International Herald Tribune
About the Translator
Yu Young-nan has translated several Korean works into English, including The Naked Tree, by Pak Wan-so. Her translations of Yi Mu-yong’s “Lesson One, Chapter One” and Farmers received the Korean Modern Literature Translation Award.
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