NEWS

By STEPHANIE GUNTER
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL – Tong-gyu Hwang, South Korea’s leading poet and professor emeritus of English literature at Seoul National University, will visit the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill this month.

Hwang will speak on "Modernism, the Wildebeest’s River: Modern Korean Poetry" at 5 p.m. Jan. 15 in the faculty lounge of the Morehead Building. He also will read from his work at 3:30 p.m. Jan. 20 in Donovan Lounge of Greenlaw Hall. Both events are free and open to the public.

"Tong-gyu Hwang is internationally recognized as Korea’s most celebrated living poet, having consistently won literary awards for work begun at the age of 18, when he wrote dramatic lyrics that changed the course of modern Korean poetry," said Dr. Robert Kirkpatrick, UNC English professor. "He is a truly remarkable bridge between English sensibility and Western concerns."

Hwang’s Jan 15 lecture will concern ideas and attitudes of writers in Korea during the last 40 years that distinguish the moderns from the ancients, and how various poets dealt, successfully or not, with modernist concepts of self, nature and language, Kirkpatrick said. Hwang compares those concepts to a swift river in which wildebeests either learned to negotiate or drowned.

The lecture will be in English. At the reading, Hwang will read in both English and Korean, with translators also reading some of his work in English.

Hwang’s works have been translated into French, German, Spanish and English. He has been a visiting scholar, lecturer or reader at universities in Stockholm, Sweden; Naples, Italy; Berlin; Bonn, Germany; New York; and Berkeley, Calif. Hwang has translated works by or written about major Western writers including Jonathan Swift, Lord Byron, T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats.

Hwang has taught English literature for 30 years at Seoul National University.

"To have Tong-gyu Hwang, South Korea's leading poet, as our guest, and to have him presented and translated by our own highly creative spirit, Professor Robert Kirkpatrick, make for a truly special midwinter treat indeed," said Bland Simpson, director of UNC’s creative writing program. "I believe people will really enjoy Mr. Hwang's songs from the other side of the sphere."

Hwang will be a guest of the program and of the Asian studies curriculum and the Carolina Asia Center. For more information on Hwang’s lecture, contact the Asian studies office at 962-4294. For more information on his reading, contact the creative writing program office at 962-4000.

- 30 -

(Gunter, of Raleigh, is a senior majoring in journalism and mass communication.)

Contact: Creative Writing Program: Bland Simpson, 962-4007, bsimpson@email.unc.edu Curriculum in Asian Studies: Miles Fletcher, 962-5577, 962-6823, wmfletch@email.unc.edu

News Services Contact: L.J. Toler, 962-8589, laura_toler@unc.edu