Song Kyung-dong

Song Kyung-dong is a South Korean poet, essayist, and labor activist best known for his proletarian poetry which depicts the working-class and the masses as the locus of resistance and revolution. In 2014, he was sentenced to prison for organizing the Hope Bus protests, in which hundreds of buses swarmed an industrial site to prevent layoffs and improve working conditions. He is known for directly participating in various protests and writing firsthand accounts of the scene through poetry, earning him the nickname “poet of the streets” and “poet of the scene.” His poetry collections include Sound Sleep (2006), Answers to Trivial Questions (2009), and I Am Not a Korean (2016). Dreamers Are Dragged Away (2012) is his first and only essay collection. He has won the Cheon Sang-byeong Poetry Prize (2010), the Shin Dong-yup Literature Prize (2011), and the Gosan Yun Seon-do Literary Award (2016).