Reasons for Selecting the 36th Yi Sang Literary Award Grand Prize Winner
Part 1 Grand Prize Winner and Author Kim Young-ha
- Grand Prize Winner | Kim Young-ha? Corn and Me
-Charity Masterpiece | The Man Who Sold His Shadow
-Acceptance Speech | It's a great job if you don't have to write.
- Literary Autobiography | Bad Habits
-Author's Note | Explaining the Mind - Yeom Seung-sook
-Theory of the Work | They Do It Without Knowing It - Jang Du-yeong

Part 2 Excellence Award Winner
-It's a trap | After dinner
-Kim Kyung-wook | Spray
-Ha Seong-ran | Afternoon, Crossing
-Kim Soom | Noodles
-Jo Hae-jin | Yuri
-Choi Je-hoon | Portrait of Miru
-Jo Hyun | At that moment, you and I

Part 3 Selection Process and Judging Comments
-Review and selection process
-Reviews
Kim Yun-sik: Is there an exit from today's novel?
Seo Young-eun: To escape from the cubicle of consciousness
Yun Hu-myeong: Opening the Horizons of Korean Literature
Kwon Young-min: A fantastical motif embodied within a frame
Shin Kyung-sook: Kim Young-ha's eloquence and ideas blossoming between sentences

The purpose and selection method of the 'Lee Sang Literary Award'

■ The 《Yi Sang Literary Award Anthology》 has been updated to mark the 40th anniversary of the Literary Thought Award.

The Yi Sang Literary Award Anthology, which all readers who love Korean literature eagerly await every year, has finally been published.
The Yi Sang Literary Award Anthology, which collects only the best short and medium-length stories published throughout the year, is considered the pinnacle of Korean novel aesthetics, representing the flow of modern novels, thanks to its rational, fair, and unique judging process and award-winning works that clearly highlight the golden part of Korean novel literature.
In particular, the 2012 Lee Sang Literary Award Anthology will be presented to readers with a new design to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the founding of Munhaksasang.
We focused on preserving the feeling of authority, tradition, and an entertaining novel, and designed it so that the award-winning author and his work are immediately visible.

The grand prize winner of the 2011 Yi Sang Literary Award was Kim Young-ha's "Corn and I", which was selected after careful deliberation by five judges (Kim Yun-sik, Seo Young-eun, Yoon Hu-myeong, Kwon Young-min, and Shin Kyung-sook).
This year's grand prize winner, Kim Young-ha's "Corn and I," is a work that uses fantastical techniques to narrate the reality that human beings' pursuit of physical and material desires is destroying the authenticity of life.

In addition to the grand prize winner Kim Young-ha's "Corn and I" and the charity work "The Man Who Sold the Shadow," this collection also includes the Excellence Award winners Ham Jeong-im's "After Dinner," Kim Kyung-wook's "Spray," Ha Seong-ran's "Afternoon, Crossing," Kim Soom's "Noodles," Jo Hae-jin's "Glass," Choi Je-hoon's "Portrait of Miru," and Jo Hyeon's "At That Moment, You and I," among others. These works stand out for their unique imagination and experimental nature, adding to the fun and enjoyment of reading.

■ Kim Young-ha's "Corn and I": The Selection Process for the Grand Prize

The final selection for the Yi Sang Literary Award was held on January 3, 2012.
The final selection committee included critics Kim Yun-sik and Kwon Yeong-min (editor-in-chief of Literature and Thought), as well as novelists Seo Yeong-eun, Yoon Hu-myeong, and Shin Kyung-sook, winners of the Yi Sang Literary Award.

Among the short and medium-length stories published last year, the following works passed the preliminary screening process and were selected for the final round after receiving recommendations from over 100 literary critics, literary magazine editors, literary reporters, and literary researchers.


Kim Young-ha's "Corn and Me"
Trap Im "After dinner"
Kim Kyung-wook's "Spray"
Ha Seong-ran, "Afternoon, Crossing"
Kim Soom's "Noodles"
Cho Hae-jin "Yuri"
Choi Je-hoon, "Portrait of Miru"
Jo Hyun, "That Moment You and I"

In the final stage of deciding on the winner of the Yi Sang Literary Award, the judges continued the evaluation, leaving “Noodles” and “Corn and I” as the final candidates.
It took over two hours of discussion to decide on Kim Young-ha's "Corn and I" as the grand prize winner, and in selecting "Corn and I" as the winner, the jury highly praised author Kim Young-ha's creative activities to date, and above all, the work's "perspective of the author who interprets the destruction of human relationships as the tyranny of urban civilization and institutions," and its novelistic journey that shows a path for Korean literature as world literature that no one has yet taken.

■The Grand Prize Winner "Corn and Me" and 7 Excellence Award Winners

"Corn and I" is a work that places fantastic motifs with allegorical elements before and after the story in the novel.
The speaker, 'I', suffers from the delusion that chickens are chasing him as corn, even though he is not corn.
Here, 'I's' occupation is a novelist, and I am urged to submit manuscripts by my divorced ex-wife who works at a publishing company.
A publishing company president from Wall Street lends me his American apartment and encourages me to write there, and I have a physical relationship with the president's wife in America.
Eventually, 'I' was caught by the boss at the scene and received a bag of medicine from him. As soon as I swallowed it, I realized that I had turned into corn.
Author Kim Young-ha fantastically handles the ecological conflict revealed in corn and chicken, further enhancing the narrative's figurative quality.


In addition to the grand prize winner, other notable works include “After Dinner” by Ham Jeong-im, which depicts the story of several people with a connection to Mr. P having dinner at Mr. Sun-nam’s house to commemorate him; “Spray” by Kim Kyung-wook, which begins when a package addressed to room 109 is mistakenly picked up by the person living in room 709; and “Crossing the Afternoon” by Ha Seong-ran, which impressively portrays the subject of “cubicle.”
Also, Kim Soom's "Noodles," which competed with the target work until the end, lyrically tells the story of the process of making a bowl of noodles from dough to dough through the confession of a woman.
This story, in which the protagonist, who cannot have children, cooks noodles for his stepmother, who is not related to him by blood but who was kicked out for not being able to have children and came into his house as a new wife, is a work that stands out for its meticulousness and density.
Next is Jo Hae-jin's "Yuri."
The protagonist, Han Yu-ri, lives with the scars of being sexually assaulted as a child. She tells stories from the past, comparing the world she once lived in to a world made of glass.
In “Portrait of Miru,” Choi Jae-hoon tells the story of a woman named Miru and the man who painted her portrait from two perspectives.
Miru, who asked a painter to draw her, ends up entering the painting, and after that, all the paintings the man draws turn into portraits of Miru.
Lastly, Jo Hyun's "That Moment You and I".
This work is the story of 'Mi-seol', the daughter of a shaman, and 'I'.
The mysterious story of Mi-seol, who inherited her mother's magical powers and can see the future, and 'I', who believes in Mi-seol's story and decides to change fate, is fun to read throughout.


■ From the 'Acceptance Speech' of Grand Prize-winning author Kim Young-ha

I started a novel, continued it, and finished it.
That's already more than enough compensation.
I was miserable because I couldn't write, I was afraid while writing, and I was happy for a moment after writing.
But I received this award.
I believe that literary awards exist somewhere outside of the identity of a writer and the essence of literature as an art form, but not too far away.
The moon revolves around the Earth, but the Earth is not.
But I don't want to imagine an Earth without a moon.
Thank you.
Not as a writer, but as a human being.
I will take this as encouragement from my fellow writers who have lived well so far and return to the work I believe I must do.