Last October, Professor Han Gi-hyeong was selected to receive the 11th annual Imhwa Literature Award for his book Colonial Cultural Area-censorship/Dual Publishing Market/Sentence under Colonization. The Imhwa Literature Award was established in 2008 to celebrate the academic works and literary achievements of Imhwa, a writer who was unrivaled in the history of modern Korean literature. The award is given to the person who has made great achievements in the fields of writing, criticism, and academics. This year’s recipient, Han Gi-hyeong, graduated from SKKU with a degree in Korean Language and Literature, and he has worked as a professor at SKKU since 2002. He focused his studies on the effect of Japanese colonial censorship on Korean modern culture for 17 years and was able to finally publish his award-winning book in June 2019. The book discusses Japanese censorship on sentence expressions during the colonial era. He established an academic organization to investigate Japanese censorship with five other professors and collected great quantities of data to complete his book. The organizing committee of the Imhwa Literature Award said that it might not be a coincidence that the book about the trace of Japanese censorship to Korean literature won the prize at the peak of historical conflict between Korea and Japan. The awards ceremony was held on October 12th at SKKU and he was awarded a certificate and a plaque with ten million won of prize money.
