Yi Won

South Korean avant-garde poet Yi Won grew up in Seoul. She earned a BA from Seoul Institute of the Arts and an MA in creative writing from Dongguk University. Her first poems appeared in print in 1992. She is the author of the poetry collections Geudeuli jigureul jibaehaeteul ttae (When They Ruled the Earth, 1996), Yahoo!ui gangmul-e cheongae-ui dali tteunda (A Thousands Moons Rising Over the River of Yahoo!, 2001), Sesang-eseo gajang gabyeo-un otobai (The World's Lightest Motorcycle, 2007), and Bulganeunghan jongi-ui yeoksa (The History of the Impossible Paper, 2012), all from Moonji Publishing. The recent bilingual collection The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (Zephyr Press, 2021) was translated into English by E.J. Koh and Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello. She is also the author of anchaek an-e dameun geotdeul (Everything in a Walk, 2016), from Sejong Books.

Poet-critic Wendy Xu has called Yi Won “a leading voice in contemporary Korean avant-garde poetry, combining cunning wit and social criticism with bold formal and typographic experimentation rarely seen in Korean literary history. Her work is particularly attuned to the complex mediations we have come to call the postmodern.” Xu continues, “Throughout her poems appear such images as internet news feeds, cyborgs, department stores-cum-tombstones, investor suicides, womanizing literary critics, and the world’s lightest motorcycle, which together intimate her various shades of ironic detachment as well as sober-faced reflections on the cruel realities of late late-capitalism.”

Yi Won has won many awards. She lives in Seoul, where she is currently a visiting professor at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.