Choi Jeong-Hwa
© Baek Da-Huim
Choi Jeong-Hwa was born in 1979 in Incheon. She started her literary career when her short story “Palm Beach” won the 2012 Changbi Young Writers' Award. In 2016 she published a collection of stories, Extremely Introverted (Changbi, 2016), and in the same year, her story “Internet” won the 7th Young Writers' Award and elevated her to one of the most read female writers in South Korea, gaining prominence with literary readers and critics for her "mastery of dissecting anxiety lurking within individual interiority." In her first full-length novel The Nonexistent Man (EunHaeng NaMu, 2016) she spirals from her motif of "anxiety" to explore the "mistrust immanent in social relations. Her second collection of short stories, Everything In Its Place, was published by Munhakdongne in March 2018, and her second novel, The White City Tale, in September 2019.