Novelist Lee Moon-yeol has the largest stable reader base in Korea. His work “Poet,” which has sold the least amount of copies among his works, still sold 200,000 copies and cumulated some W10 billion in royalties. It's difficult to find a more successful writer than Lee, whether in a cultural or literary sense.


His pre-author life

But Lee’s life before his debut was far from spectacular. His father was a wealthy elite (owning 1,000 bags of crops, a 40-room residence and 200 pyeong, or 660 square meters, of land). He studied in Britain and served as an agricultural professor at the prestigious Seoul National University. But he abandoned his family and fled to North Korea during the Korean War. As a result, his family remaining in the South was constantly under surveillance by anti-Communist authorities. The household struggled, and the young Lee's life was not smooth sailing. Except for elementary school, he dropped out of all the schools he attended, including Seoul National University's college of education. He then prepared for the state-administered bar exam deep in the mountains of a Buddhist temple. He failed three times, gave it up and tried his hand at literary contests held by major newspaper dailies, also to little success. He sent the manuscript of “The Son of Man”--which was later to become his debut work--to publishers, but it was rejected. His life was at a dead end and his only way out was going to the military.

After finishing his Army duty, he taught at a private institute in Daegu and finally in 1977, one of his short stories was published in a Daegu daily which marked his literary debut. Afterwards, after working for a year at a Daegu newspaper agency, he again attracted attention from readers and critics for “The Son of Man.” In 1984, he moved to Seoul and began working as a full time writer. One of his biggest strengths as a writer is that he never loses focus on the target reader while writing. The reader as he defines it is not an abstract concept, but a concrete and real person who prefers certain types of fiction over others. The strength and persuasiveness of his writing owes to his ability to target the right readers and write as if he were communicating with them throughout the process. He says setting the target reader group is the start of all his creation, and the buttress that holds up the entire process. He also says he tries not to forget the time when he was simply a reader himself. Another aspect to note is that Lee constantly guards against reckless faith in ideology, belief or theories which people often cling to in the context of history, religion and academic studies. For this reason, he is criticized by liberal colleagues as a skeptical intellect, yet also praised for standing up to the intellectual circle and providing an opportunity for self-reflection. His works have been introduced worldwide - seven in France, four in Italy, three in Spain, one each in the Netherlands, Germany, UK and Russia, as well as in Japan and China. In France, a total of 50,000 copies of his books have been published.


Social controversy surrounding Lee

Some denounce Lee as an ultra conservative or male chauvinist. They say he has represented the conservative and blasted the liberal through lectures, newspaper contributions and books in the course of the left-right ideological confrontation that surfaced in the mid-1990s. His famous book “Choice” was rejected by women activists for “his criticism of modern feminism using Joseon dynasty era characters.” In his 1993 newspaper novel series “Odysseia Seoul,” his 1999 work “Eve, or the last night of the era” and his 2001 “Pulling the liquor bottle and glass”, Lee negatively portrayed real life politicians like former president Kim Dae-jung and lawmaker Choo Mi-ae, with whom he didn’t share the same political view. In protest, some readers in 2001 collectively bought the book, only to throw them away in a staged “book funeral” performance. And this year, allegations of plagiarism have emerged. His most representative work “Our Twisted Hero” is accused of having a very a similar plot and story development arc with Hwang Seok-yeong’s short story “For my younger brother.” The claim, first raised in 2004, has been rekindled by literary critic Ban Gyeong-hwan. Whatever message Lee is trying to convey in his novels, it’s certain that the questions he raises are the future tasks of Korean society.