The runaway bestseller that has sold over one million copies internationally, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is the most important book to have come out of South Korea since Han Kang’s The Vegetarian.

Kim Jiyoung is the most common name for Korean women born in the 1980s.
Kim Jiyoung is representative of her generation:

At home, she is an unfavoured sister to her princeling little brother.
In primary school, she is a girl who has to line up behind the boys at lunchtime.
In high school, she is a daughter whose father blames her for being harassed late at night.
In university, she is a good student who doesn’t get put forward for internships by her professor.
In the office, she is an exemplary employee who is overlooked for promotion by her manager.
At home, she is a wife who has given up her career to take care of her husband and her baby.
Kim Jiyoung is depressed.
Kim Jiyoung has started to act out.
Kim Jiyoung is her own woman.
Kim Jiyoung is insane.

Kim Jiyoung’s husband sends her to see a psychiatrist.
This is his clinical assessment of the everywoman in contemporary Korea.

CHO NAM-JOO is a former television scriptwriter who subverted the landscape of feminist discourse in Korea with her international bestseller, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, which sold in twenty-five countries and was longlisted for the National Book Award. She graduated from the Department of Sociology of Ewha Womans University and is the author of the dystopian thriller Saha. She lives in South Korea.

Cho Nam-Joo's profile page

JAMIE CHANG is an award-winning translator and teaches at the Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea.

Jamie Chang's profile page

• Long-listed, National Book Award for Translated Literature
• Commended, A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2020

This tale has immediate resonance . . . Cho’s matter-of-fact delivery underscores the pervasive gender imbalance, while just containing the empathic rage.

Booklist

This novel is about the banality of the evil that is systemic misogyny . . . Upon its publication in South Korea in 2016, the book, which sold more than a million copies, had an Uncle Tom’s Cabin effect, propelling a feminist wave. It’s easy to see why.

New York Times

As she unveils the lifetime of misogyny her protagonist has faced in South Korea, Cho Nam-Joo points to a universal dialogue around discrimination, hopelessness, and fear.

Time Magazine

In this fine — and beautifully translated — biography of a fictional Korean woman, we encounter the real experiences of many women around the world.

Spectator (U.K.)

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 has much in common with Han Kang’sThe Vegetarian.

Los Angeles Review of Books

The novel’s virtue lies in its broad social impact . . . To read the book is to imagine being a restive, aggrieved millennial and to trace [Kim Jiyoung’s] path through everyday misogyny.

New York Review of Books

[Cho Nam-joo] pulls no punches in her delineation of cultural misogyny … The author’s particular achievement is in blending political and stylistic concerns in a cool tone carefully captured in Jamie Chang’s translation … Cho’s moving, witty, and powerful novel forces us to face our reality, in which one woman is seen, pretty much, as interchangeable with any other.

Telegraph (U.K.)

A clear-eyed look at damage done.

Straits Times

As she unveils the lifetime of misogyny her protagonist has faced in South Korea, Cho Nam-Joo points to a universal dialogue around discrimination, hopelessness, and fear.

Time Magazine

Cho’s novel became a rallying cry for South Korean women . . . While Cho’s focus is on South Korean culture, the normalisation of violence and harassment in the book seems all too familiar.

Guardian

A cultural call to arms . . . Like Bong Joon Ho’s Academy Award–winning film Parasite, which unleashed a debate about class disparities in South Korea, Cho’s novel was treated as a social treatise as much as a work of art.

New York Times