South Korean · b. 1979
Sohn Won-pyung is a South Korean novelist and film director, born in Seoul in 1979. She studied sociology and philosophy at Sogang University and film directing at the Korean Academy of Film Arts, and won a Cine21 film criticism prize in 2001 before making a series of short films. For years she entered literary contests under more than thirty pen names without success. After her child was born in 2013 she wrote in whatever spare minutes she had, and the result, Almond, won the Changbi Prize for Young Adult Fiction in 2016. The novel follows a boy who cannot feel emotions; it has been translated into more than a dozen languages and won the Japan Booksellers' Award for translated fiction. Her second novel, Counterattack of the Thirty, won the Jeju 4·3 Peace Literature Award in 2017, and in 2020 she directed her first feature film, the thriller Intruder.