KO UN

Ko Un is born in 1933 in Gunsan,north Jeolla province in South Korea,Ko.Un is Korea's foremost living writer .After immense suffering during the Korean war ,he became a Buddhist monk,his first poems were published in 1958,then a few years later he returned to the world.He became a leading spokesman in the struggle for freedom and democracy during the 1970s and 1980s.Ko.Un is a remarkable poet and one of human freedom in this half century,a religious poet who got tangled by accident in the terrible accidents of modern history,but he is somebody who has been equal to the task ,a feat rare among human beings.In 1942,by the time he was eight ,he had already studied classical Chinese texts that even much older children usually had difficulty in mastering.In 1942 when he was in grade three ,his Japanese head master asked him what he hoped to become in the future and got the answer;The Emperor of Japan !.Ko Un was severely punished for this effrontery.Before the war was over in 1952,he joined the Buddhist clergy and became the recognized disciple of the great monk Hyobong for the next ten years he lived a life of zen meditation,always on the move.He traveled the whole country ,living by aims.In a struggle for which he was often arrested and imprisoned ,he has published more than 120 volumes of poems,essays ,and fiction in recent years,selections from his work have been translated in to at least 14 languages.His books such as:The sound of my waves-"Flower of a moment"-The three way tavern-Ten thousand lives.