Ten Thousand Lives

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(53 47 68 1)>Born in 1933 in a small rural village in Korea's North Cholla Province </span><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(53 47 68 1)>Ko Un</strong><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(53 47 68 1)> grew up in a Japanese-controlled land that was soon to experience the horrors of the Korean War. He became a Buddhist monk in 1952 and began writing in the late 1950s.</span></p><p></p><p><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(53 47 68 1)><em>Ten Thousand Lives</em></strong><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(53 47 68 1)> is his major ongoing work which began in prison with a determination to describe every person he had ever met or heard of. It tells the stories of many figures from Korean history as well as children and poor people who without his poems would have vanished into oblivion. Green Integer also published selections from </span><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(53 47 68 1)><em>Vols. 21-25</em></strong><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(53 47 68 1)> (2021) and from </span><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(53 47 68 1)><em>Vols. 26-30</em></strong><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(53 47 68 1)> (2023) of this magnum opus.</span></p><p></p><p><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(53 47 68 1)><em>Maninbo</em></strong><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(53 47 68 1)> as it is known in Korea represents one of the major classics of 20th-century Korean Literature. It currently contains 4001 poems in 30 volumes. </span><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(53 47 68 1)>Ko Un</strong><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(53 47 68 1)> has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize for Literature.</span></p>