About

Key One Yeom (염기원, also romanized Yeom Ki-won) is a South Korean novelist whose fiction takes place where people earn, lose and fake a living: the subcontractor offices of Seoul's Guro Digital Complex, a six-pyeong officetel, an amateur boxing gym, a basement theater in Daehak-ro.

He published his first book at thirteen, a collection of his prize-winning school essays. At Korea University, where he studied business administration, he founded three venture companies in a row and appeared on national television, then abruptly left on a trip around the country to become a writer. After serving as an army officer, he worked in tech at a web portal, a media-rep company and startups. In 2014 he wound up his last startup to focus on fiction; he continues to work as an IT consultant.

That year his short story “15 Minutes” won the Top Excellence Award at the first Convergence Story Short Fiction Contest. In 2015 he made his literary debut when “The Man Who Lives in Hell” won the 29th newcomer award of the literary quarterly Munhak-ui Bom. His first novel, Goody Jeanne d'Arc, won the 5th Hwangsanbeol Young Writers' Award and its 50-million-won prize in 2019. The jury called it a powerful, provocative work that looks squarely at the changed reality of 21st-century Korea.

He then spent two years on what he calls his “creative march,” writing eight novels back to back. Once he started a draft he wrote every day without exception until it was finished, logging his progress in a spreadsheet and keeping to a routine of stretching, strength training, running and piano. The settings range from a cave in Gangwon Province and a fishing village with a lighthouse to Zimbabwe's Mana Pools National Park and outer space. Five of his six published novels have appeared since 2022.

Readers often describe his realism as frightening: “a hyperrealist disaster novel,” “scarier than any thriller.” He counts entertainment as fiction's first virtue and keeps his humor even in the darkest material, while hiding allegories beneath the surface for readers who want to dig. He has also hosted a podcast for which he interviewed scores of con artists, and has worked as a lecturer and consultant.

He is a member of Wolgeup Realism (“Salary Realism”), the writers' collective started by novelist Chang Kang-myoung to put the working lives of ordinary Koreans on the page, and his novel Schoolgirl Champ King Arthur was supported by the ARKO Literary Creation Fund of Arts Council Korea.