Un Su Kim Books in Order

Un Su Kim was born in 1972 in Busan, South Korea's southern port city. He grew up there, in a family with deep roots in the area, and Busan has stayed close to his work even when his stories head into stranger, darker territory.

As a young man, Kim spent plenty of time roaming its streets. He has spoken of walking through the city with his first girlfriend after meeting her at seventeen, and of wandering after he did not pass a college entrance exam. Years later, those memories gave him a different way to look at the place he had once grown tired of.

The city never quite left him.

Kim studied Korean literature at Kyung Hee University in Seoul and completed master's-level coursework there. He kept writing through his university years, building a grounding in literary theory while figuring out what kind of stories he wanted to tell. His official literary career began in his early thirties, after he had already spent years working at the craft.

His short fiction began appearing in 2002. He later won a new-writer contest for the story Breaking Up with Friday, and his first novel, The Cabinet, received the Munhakdongne Novel Award in 2006. It was an early sign of the direction his fiction would take: everyday systems, odd cases, and people who do not fit neatly into the roles assigned to them.

In The Cabinet, a weary office worker oversees files on “symptomers,” people with baffling traits and experiences that may point toward a new kind of human being. The book is funny in a dry, unsettling way, but it also cares about loneliness, memory, and what happens when a person is treated as a problem to be filed away. Its English translation by Sean Lin Halbert introduced many new readers to Kim's more fantastical side.

Then came The Plotters.

Originally published in Korea in 2010 and translated into English by Sora Kim-Russell in 2019, it follows Reseng, an assassin raised inside a shadowy library that helps organize contract killings. Kim uses the crime-thriller setup to build a slightly off-kilter Seoul full of old fixers, corporate operators, buried rules, and people trying to get out from under someone else's plan. The novel was shortlisted for France's Grand Prix de Littérature Policière.

Kim returned to Busan in Hot Blooded, a crime novel set around the port city's underworld near the end of the twentieth century. The book won the Hahn Moo-Sook Literary Prize and was later adapted for film. Across these novels, his characters are often isolated people, sometimes violent or absurd, who still want a way to be understood. That mix of bleak humor, social pressure, and genuine feeling is a good reason to start with him.