Part 1: Midnight's Intruders
Part 2: A Long Day
Part 3: Faraway Seas
Part 4 Secret

Author's Note
Judges' comments

The full-length novel 『Spring Camp of My Life』 by Jeong Yu-jeong (41), winner of the 2007 1st World Youth Literature Award with a prize of 50 million won, was published by Biryongso.
The 'World Youth Literature Award', established for the first time this year, was open to both established writers and unpublished writers, and the first winner was 'My Life's Spring Camp'.
This work received favorable reviews from the judges, who commented, “Once you pick it up, you can’t put it down, and it’s breathless reading, like riding the Blue Dragon Train,” and called it “a masterpiece that engraves the era, humanity, and innocent love.”

The novel begins in a village near Suwon in the summer of August 1986.
The fifteen-year-old protagonist, Jun-ho, is asked by a friend to deliver his brother's passport and travel expenses so that he can escape overseas, a legendary figure in the student movement.
The meeting place is Imjado, Sinan, Namdo.
Jun-ho planned a solo trip, but the trip becomes a mess when uninvited guests, Seung-ju and Jeong-ah, his friends from the same neighborhood, suddenly show up.
Add to this an unidentified grandfather and a Doberman pinscher named Roosevelt, and the journey of these five companions is told like a road movie, with the first-person narrator Jun-ho's unstoppable wit and humor.

Jun-ho, who lives with a longing for his father who went missing during the Gwangju Democratization Movement in 1980; Jeong-ah, who lives with a hardened heart while committing domestic violence; and Seung-ju, the only child of a local landowner but who has a mental illness due to her parents' excessive interference and oppression. The story of these three children jumping into an unfamiliar world and going on a difficult journey together, and after all kinds of twists and turns, finally holding onto one of life's 'secrets', presents a different kind of emotion to today's teenagers who only imagine life in their heads.

The author, who began the story with the question, “What if there was a spring camp in our lives?”, talks about teenagers like this.
It is said to be a time when the whole body is boiling with passion, 1 degree Celsius higher than the human body temperature of 36.5 degrees Celsius.
It's a bit disappointing that teenagers these days are only thinking about their passion and making decisions about their lives in a 'cool' way.
I hope that these children, who are unbalanced, will experience all the adventures and journeys they can go through before the main game of life, just like the three children in the story, rolling down the dirt road and directly colliding with the world.

If the major trend in Korean youth novels has been to deal with the inner thoughts of children trapped within the somewhat limited framework of their lives—school, their surroundings, and their friends—Jeong Yu-jeong's work is a story of children who break that framework and boldly plunge into the world, almost to the point of ignorance, and will add a new color to Korean youth literature.


■ A story from the 80s, melted into the landscape


As this work is set in the 1980s, the author does not miss the scenery of this era and captures it in his writing.
The setting is that he helps his friend's legendary brother, a member of the student movement, to escape overseas; Jun-ho, who lives with the pain of his father who disappeared after being implicated in the Gwangju Democratization Movement in 1980; the story of grandfather Park Yang-su, who lost his young daughter to the merciless gunfire of soldiers while going to downtown Gwangju to get his daughter's eyes treated and was taken to the Samcheong Education Corps with an unjust accusation; the story of the Gwangju protests for a direct election system; etc. Instead of directly depicting the pain of that time, which is now being forgotten, in an incredibly grand and sacred story, the author appropriately incorporates it into the story.