Ten Thousand Lives

Born in 1933 in a small rural village in Korea's North Cholla Province, Ko Un 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.

Ten Thousand Lives 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 Vols. 21-25 (2021) and from Vols. 26-30 (2023) of this magnum opus.

Maninbo, as it is known in Korea, represents one of the major classics of 20th-century Korean Literature. It currently contains 4,001 poems in 30 volumes. Ko Un has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize for Literature.