Song Jihyun Gazes into the Void of Collapsed Family Bonds... Wins Kim Seungok Literary Award Grand Prize
Short Story “The Things I Do Best” Wins Top Honor
141 Works by Authors With Over Ten Years’ Experience Reviewed
Munhakdongne New Writer’s Award:
Poetry – Lee Suhwan, Fiction – Kim Donguk, Criticism – Kwon Eunmi
How do people remain by each other’s side even after the collapse of familism and the patriarchal order? Song Jihyun’s short story “The Things I Do Best,” which delves deeply into that question, has been selected as the grand prize winner of this year’s Kim Seungok Literary Award.
The publisher Munhakdongne announced on August 21 that, after reviewing 141 short stories published by writers with at least ten years of experience between July last year and June this year, Song Jihyun’s “The Things I Do Best” was selected as the winner of the 2026 Kim Seungok Literary Award. The work was published in the 2025 winter issue of Daesanmunhwa. The grand prize comes with an award of 50 million won.
The judges noted that the story “casts a light on women who struggled to survive on their own in the aftermath of irreparably collapsed familism and a patriarchal system already decayed from within.” They explained that the story gained broad support from judges of all generations for presenting a new style of distinctive family fiction.
Song Jihyun began her literary career in 2013 when her work “A Study on Punk Rock Style Straw Design” was recognized in the New Year’s Literary Contest by the Dong-A Ilbo. She has published short story collections such as “For Example, In the Manner of an Epilogue” and “What We Eat in Summer,” as well as the essay “Life in Donghae.” She won the Tomorrow’s Korean Writers Award in 2021 and, in 2022, received the 55th Korea Times Literary Award for “What We Eat in Summer.”
The theme of family has been a consistent variation in Song Jihyun’s work. In “What We Eat in Summer,” she looked beyond the life of youth to explore issues of family and generation. At the time, she remarked that, unlike the supposed cohesion of a ‘normal family,’ she had long reflected on the looser bonds of actual families. In her latest award-winning story, her focus shifted toward the lives of women surviving within the framework of collapsed familism and patriarchy.
The excellence awards went to: “Tale of Transformation” by Park Seoryeon, “New Year’s Concert” by Seo Yumi, “Without Even a Curtain Call” by An Boyun, “You Are My Story” by Im Hyun, “Meter Reader” by Jeong Yongjun, and “Failure Story Crew” by Jeong Ihyun.
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On the same day, Munhakdongne also announced the recipients of the 2026 Munhakdongne New Writer’s Award. In the poetry category, Lee Suhwan’s “The End and the Beginning” and four other poems were chosen; in the fiction category, Kim Donguk’s “One and the One Inside One”; and in the criticism category, Kwon Eunmi’s “Embodying the Most Universal Sorrow, To You─A Study of Ko Seonkyung” were selected as winning works. The judges’ comments and the winning entries will be published in the autumn 2026 issue of the quarterly magazine Munhakdongne.
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