A sweeping account of modern Korean history told through one writer's imprisonment-in time, in language, and in a divided country-from Korea's most acclaimed novelist.

In 1993, writer and democracy activist Hwang Sok-yong was sentenced to five years in the Seoul Detention Center upon his return to South Korea from North Korea, the country he had fled with his family as a child at the start of the Korean War. Already a dissident writer well-known for his part in the democracy movement of the 1980s, Hwang's imprisonment forced him to consider the many prisons to which he was subject-of thought, of writing, of Cold War nations, of the heart.

In this capacious memoir, Hwang's life is set against the volatile political backdrop of modern Korea, a country subject to colonialism, Cold War division, a devastating war, decades of authoritarian dictatorships, a mass democratic uprising, and a still-lingering, painful division between North and South. The Prisoner moves between Hwang's imprisonment and scenes from his life-as a boy in Pyongyang and Seoul, as a young activist protesting South Korea's military dictatorships, as a soldier in the Vietnam War, as a dissident writer first traveling abroad-and in so doing, braids his extraordinary life into the dramatic revolutions and transformations of Korean society during the twentieth century.

"Hwang Sok-yong is one of the most read Korean writers in his country, and best known abroad. An activist for democracy and reconciliation with the North, in his books he melds his political fights with the Korean cultural imagination." - Le Monde

"Reality, fiction and fantasy mix closely, giving his writing unparalleled power. Hwang Sok-yong's empathy for his heroes is always accompanied by a fierce rage against the powerful." - Le Monde Diplomatique

"A powerful yet modest and profound meditation on personal responsibility and what a fulfilled life might mean... Yet At Dusk never trips over into nostalgia or sentimentality. Hwang's writing is laced with the hard-won wisdom of a man with plenty left to say." - The Guardian

"Epic in its scope ... a passionate, detailed memoir." - Foreword Reviews

"Page-turning ... By offering the reader a holistic view of his literal and metaphorical imprisonment, Hwang poignantly illustrates what it means to be exiled by politics, geography, language, and emotional ties." - NPR Books

"Cinematic, riveting, elegiac ... The Prisoner expands Hwang's literary scope, uniting his life experience with the compassionate realism of his later works." - NPR Books

"A fascinating account of a life lived for art and campaigns for freedom and justice" - ArtReview

"Despite having had not so much as a pen to keep a diary, Hwang recalls the techniques he employed and adaptations he made to endure [the] psychological privations and physical discomforts [of prison] in a remarkably high degree of detail." - Los Angeles Review of Books