South Korea Sets its Sights on the Nobel Prize in Literature

While South Korea has had enormous success exporting K-Pop, Samsung phones, and LG washing machines, it still lags where “serious” cultural commodities are concerned—like literature. No Korean has ever won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the government wants to change that. To give Korean literature a boost on the international stage, South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has been pouring millions of dollars into its Korean Literature Translation Institute.

Can the industrial and corporate manufacturing strategies that have been so effective in lifting the country's economy boost its literature, too? Producer Mythili Rao investigates.

Reporting for this story was supported by a fellowship from the International Center for Journalists. A version of this story appears online on The New Yorker’s site.