Alexander Kan

Alexander Kan is an internationally acclaimed writer from Kazakhstan and a Koryo saram, part of the Korean Diaspora in the former Soviet Union. His novels, poems, and essays have been published in Russian and translated into English, German, Swedish and Korean. His works of fiction include The Age of the Family (1993), Unborn Dreams (1994), The Costumier (2001), Finding the Shaman (2004), and The Triangular Land (2 vols., 2005). Since 1989, he has working on the Invisible Island, a philosophical inquiry into Diasporic consciousness and ethnic existentialism. Kan has written numerous TV and film scripts for studios in Alma-Ata, Moscow, London and Berlin and adapted his own novel, The Other Sky, for a feature-length film. In 2003, he won the World Scenario Competition in Seoul for his script about the post-Soviet Korean Diaspora. 

 

Alexander Kan was born in Pyongyang, North Korea, to a North Korean father and a Soviet-Korean mother. In 1961, he moved with his family to Leningrad, then to Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. After completing secondary school in Alma-Ata, Kan majored in physics at the Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology. While a student, he worked as a gravedigger, a night watchman, a loader, a physics teacher, a stagehand, a waiter, and a long-distance train operator. Later, he completed his graduate work at the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow, with a thesis on the poetics of Vladimir Nabokov. In 1994 he won a competition for new young writers sponsored by the literary magazine Novy Mir.

 

http://world.lib.ru/k/kim_o_i/a15.shtml