Yi T’aejun was born in northern Korea in 1904 and settled in Seoul, where he became one of colonial Korea’s most prolific and influential writers. Yi crossed the 38th parallel to North Korea in 1946. His date of death is unknown.
Janet Poole is a translator and literary historian who teaches Korean literature at the University of Toronto. She is also the translator of Eastern Sentiments, a collection of Yi T’aejun’s essays (Columbia, 2009), and the author of When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea (Columbia, 2014).