Her father is the poet Kim Dong-hwan, one of of Korea’s foremost modernist poets (he wrote of Korea’s first modern epic, Night at the Border), and her mother is the famous novelist Choi Jeong-hee. Kim grew up with her older sister under the care of her mother after her father was kidnapped by the North Korean government during the political turmoil after the Korean War.
She studied painting at Ewha Womans University.
Kim Chae-won is a South Korean author best known for the dreamlike quality of her prose. They have collaborated on the short story collections Faraway House Faraway Sea and Home, She Was Not There. Kim Chae-won’s childhood growing up without a father has had a direct and indirect effect on her work.
In Kim’s novels her father is depicted as a victim of of Korea’s tragic history.
The remaining family copes with his absence and decline, becoming tragic victims themselves. The pain and lack in the family that comes with the father’s absence and decline becomes rooted as a trauma that controls their lives thereon.
The wounds of of Korea’s modern history are thus at the bottom of Kim’s work characterized by its fantastical and dreamlike aesthetic.
