Founded in 2002, Slow Walking is an independent Korean publisher of poetry, essays, and photography. We publish books not for a season, but for a lifetime.
— Park Nohae (1957~)
Poet, photographer, revolutionary — and more
In 1984, a twenty-seven-year-old factory worker published a book of poems under a pseudonym meaning "liberation of labor." It was banned at once. It sold a million copies.
For years the dictatorship hunted the "Faceless Poet." When they finally caught him, prosecutors demanded death — and he smiled. That photograph is now one of the iconic images of modern Korea.
He served seven and a half years in a cell three steps wide. Pardoned in 1998, he refused all compensation, picked up a camera, and walked — for over two decades, through villages on no map, recording truth with an old film camera and a fountain pen. Today he posts a photograph and a poem every day to more than 120,000 followers worldwide.
His debut, Dawn of Labor, was published in English by the University of Hawai'i Press in 2024 — four decades after it first shook the nation that banned it.
“This translation of Park Nohae's first collection of poems could not arrive at a more propitious moment. This 'faceless poet,' this 'enemy of the state,' is not only a legendary figure in Korean letters and society but a prophet of global liberation. These poems clarify what we most need to know, wherever we may find ourselves in the world.”
— Christopher Merrill, American poet and former director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, on Dawn of Labor (University of Hawai'i Press, 2024)
For readers of Pablo Neruda and Mahmoud Darwish.