| Ri Ki-yong | |||||||||||
| Birth Date: | May 29, 1895 | ||||||||||
| Birth Place: | Asan, South Chungcheong Province, Joseon | ||||||||||
| Death Place: | Pyongyang, North Korea | ||||||||||
| Language: | Korean | ||||||||||
| Nationality: | North Korean | ||||||||||
| Module: |
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Ri Ki-yong (; May 6, 1896 – August 9, 1984) or Lee Gi-yeong was a Korean novelist.
Ri Ki-yong was born in Asan, South Chungcheong Province, Joseon. He wrote under the name Minchon. Ri attended the Seiisku School of English in Tokyo, Japan, He worked as a member of KAPF in 1925 and was the organizer of the Choson Proletarian Writers' Federation in Seoul as well as the leader of the North Choson Federation of Literature and Arts.[1] 1926, he served as an editor of Light of Joseon (Joseon jigwang), an organ of the Korean Communist Party and a journal promoting proletarian literature. Ri Ki-yong spent more than two years in jail.[2]
After liberation from Japanese colonial rule, Ri moved to North Korea where he was key in creating the orthodox position on literature in North Korea, serving for several years in a key position in North Korean Federation of Literature and Arts. He is reported to have died in August 1988.[2]
The Korea Literature Translation Institute summarizes his contributions to literature:
Like many other North Korean writers, even famous ones, Ri is not well known in his home country, where biographical details of writers are generally not made known to the reading public. Tatiana Gabroussenko describes how, when she interviewed defectors, she:[3]