Jeong You-jeong

Jeong You Jeong is a South Korean Writer, born 1966 in Jeollanamdo Hampyeong. She is a Catholic. After graduating from the Gwangju Christian Nursing University, she worked as a nurse for 5 years, and also worked at the Health Insurance Review & Assessment Service for 9 years. Such experiences were important as a basis for building realistic narratives and story structures for her novels, Shoot Me in the Heart (내 심장을 쏴라), and Chilnyeonui bam (7년의 밤 Seven Years of Darkness).

From when she was young, Jeong You Jeong’s dream was to become a writer, but she could not pursue it due to her mother’s disapproval. Jeong You Jeong had a playwright uncle who had died due to poverty during his early 40s, and her mother was very concerned that she would meet a similar fate. She is also known for her long period of practice as a writer. For 6 years she was rejected from 11 competitions. Promising to herself that she would never write again if she was rejected once more, she submitted Nae insaeng-ui spring camp (내 인생의 스프링캠프 My Life’s Spring Camp) to the Segye Youth Literature Competition and won. She was 41.

Her novel of major success, Shoot Me in the Heart (내 심장을 쏴라) is a work that alludes to her youth. While she was working as a critical care nurse during her 20s, her mother passed away, and Jeong You Jeong had to be the breadwinner for the family. She has said that she desperately withstood that period of her life by holding onto the hope of arriving to a warm sunny place once the time of difficulty had passed. Seungmin’s dream of freedom and imagining Annapurna was also Jeong You Jeong’s wish. In fact, after writing the novel 28 she went to Annapurna, and based on this experience she published a book called Jeong You Jeong’s Himalaya Hwansangbanghwang (정유정의 히말라야 환상방황 Jeong You Jeong’s Fantastic Wandering in the Himalayas).

Jeong You Jeong’s novels are becoming very popular as source material for films due to their unique characteristic of intense narratives. Shoot Me in the Heart (내 심장을 쏴라) was turned into a film in 2015 by director Mun Che-yong, starring Yeo Jin-goo and Lee Min-ki. Chilnyeonui bam (7년의 밤 Seven Years of Darkness) is being produced as a film with Choo Chang-min as the director, starring Jang Dong-gun and Ryu Seung-ryong. Her recent work Jong-ui Giwon (종의 기원 The Origin of Species) has also been optioned by a film studio, and is expected to be produced into a film.

Jeong You Jeong’s debut during the 2010s shocked the Korean literary circle. This was because compared to fellow Korean writers that had debuted through new writer’s contests or literary journals, who write works by laying out human psychology over real sentiments on life, Jeong You Jeong had actively drawn genre specific subjects into the narrative in creating a story.

The novel that made Jeong You Jeong widely known among readers was Shoot Me in the Heart (내 심장을 쏴라). This novel is very similar to Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest in terms of the narrative structure and character profiles, as if it could be an homage. Jeong You Jeong satirizes the whole Korean society through the setting of a mental hospital, and tells the story of two young men attempting to escape. Interestingly, Shoot me in the Heart (내 심장을 쏴라), which was selected as the winner of the ‘Segye Literature Award’, was supported by younger judges, but was not favorably praised by older judges. Because of this, it’s been said that there were two secret voting sessions. Literary critic Kim Hwayoung and writer Hwang Sok-yong, the judges at the time, had said that the work had a weakness in that the story was “hard to get through in the beginning,’ but also that it “makes one have sincere doubts through the metaphor of how life goes round in circles despite constantly dreaming and attempting escape”.

Jeong You Jeong’s major work, Chilnyeonui bam (7년의 밤 Seven Years of Darkness), is structured into separate narratives of a story 7 years ago, when the tragic MV Seryeong incident happened in the book, and a story happening in the current time, where a man wandering through life, marked as a murderer’s son, receives the news of his father’s execution, and attempts to solve the incident’s mysteries. As Jeong You Jeong states that she is a fan of Hemingway, Charles Dickens and Stephen King, in Chilnyeonui bam (7년의 밤 Seven Years of Darkness), she uses meticulous descriptions and a narrative that stimulates the reader’s tension. Writer Park Bum Shin has highly praised Jeong You Jeong as having "opened a new horizon for novels through literary sincerity, dynamic narratives, and daring appeals to the reader," and that she is a monster of Korean Literature, an "Amazon."

Afterwards, she published 28, which is a story about the end of the world brought about by a waterborne epidemic, and Jong-ui Giwon (종의 기원 The Origin of Species), which is a story about the origin of evil within people’s inner side.

Young adult novels

• Nae insaeng-ui spring camp (내 인생의 스프링캠프 My Life’s Spring Camp), Biryongso, 2007, ISBN 9788949120768

Novels

• Shoot Me in the Heart (내 심장을 쏴라), Eunhaengnamu, 2009, ISBN 9788956602998.
• Chilnyeonui bam (7년의 밤 Seven Years of Darkness), Eunhaengnamu, 2011.
• 28, Eunhaengnamu, 2013, ISBN 9788956607030.
• Jong-ui Giwon (종의 기원 The Origin of Species), Eunhaengnamu, 2016, ISBN 9788956609959.

Essay collection

• Jeong You Jeong’s Himalaya Hwansangbanghwang (정유정의 히말라야 환상방황 Jeong You Jeong’s Fantastic Wandering in the Himalayas), Eunhaengnamu, 2014, ISBN 9788956607726.

• 2007 1st Segye Youth Literature Competition for Nae insaeng-ui spring camp (내 인생의 스프링캠프 My Life’s Spring Camp)
• 2009 5th Segye Literature Prize for Shoot Me in the Heart (내 심장을 쏴라)