Reading is a popular pastime in North Korea, where literacy and books enjoy a high cultural standing, elevated by the regime's efforts to disseminate propaganda as texts. Because of this, writers are held in high prestige.
The division of Korea following the Second World War led to a considerable cross-border movement, which included writers moving from North to South or from South to North.
North Korea's subsequent literary tradition was shaped and controlled by the State. The "Guidelines for Juche Literature", published by the official (), emphasised that literature must extoll the country's leader, Kim Il Sung, and, later, Kim Jong Il. Only members of the Writers' Alliance are authorised to have their works published.
History
Background
Russian, and later Soviet, literature were popular in pre-liberation North Korea. Koreans viewed Russian literature very differently from Western audiences, searching for Confucian undertones of social engineering. While Westerners appreciated works like Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and War and Peace, Koreans mostly ignored these works but enjoyed his works on religion and moral treatises. Of Soviet writers, Maxim Gorky in particular was popular.
20th century
The foundations of socialist North Korean literature were laid in the period between 1945 and 1960s, when North Korea adopted many Soviet-style forms of organization. Along with them, restrictions and political imperatives found their way to literature. Immediately after the liberation, North Korea followed in the footsteps of Soviet literature. But by the de-Stalinization of the mid-1950s in the Soviet Union, the relationship changed. Kim Il Sung saw the moment as an opportunity to lessen the control of the Soviets and increase his own. He accomplished this by denouncing all things "foreign" in literature in a speech entitled "On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Juche in Ideological Work". From there on, North Korean literature would have a nationalistic outlook, but Soviet elements introduced during the 1940s would remain steadfast.
According to B. R. Myers, the work of Cho Ki-chon in the late 1940s exemplifies particular traits of the early cult of personality of Kim Il-sung built upon Soviet Marxism–Leninism and bloc conformity. They were soon replaced by the Korean ethnic nationalism of writers like Han Sorya. While Cho's Kim Il Sung is a brilliant strategist who has masculine qualities like strength and intellect, in Han's works he embodies traditional Korean virtues of innocence and naivety having "mastered Marxism–Leninism with his heart, not his brain". The ethnically inspired style of Han would establish itself as the standard of propaganda over Cho's.
Attitude toward foreign literature changed after the 1967 Kapsan Faction Incident. People were forced to burn many of their books or donate them to library collections. Among authors whose books were destroyed were Tolstoy, Gorky, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Books on Chinese, Greek, and German philosophy were eradicated as well. Researchers could access the works of Karl Marx only at designated libraries and by supplying a reason for studying his work.
According to "court poet" and now defector Jang Jin-sung, prior to 1994, when Supreme Leader Kim Il Sung was alive, the art of the novel was preeminent. Nearly all the top state honors such as the Kim Il Sung Medal, the Order of Heroic Effort, and the title of Kim Il Sung Associate were awarded to the state's novelists. The novel's length was a perfect medium to expound on the great deeds of Kim Il Sung, who was himself both an avid reader and writer of novels. After his death in 1994, the novel was replaced by poetry, which was largely due to the country's economic problems which made paper very expensive and poetry about the deeds of Dear Leader could be reproduced easily in a single newspaper page. Shorter poetry was most common, while the longer epic genre was restricted to just six poets, who were also the poets laureate of North Korea. Epic poetry (and film) became the chief vehicle of political propaganda under Kim Jong Il.
The DPRK promoted North Korean literature in Russia and China during the Cold War era. Several Soviet Koreanists published studies on DPRK literature and translations in Russian. Among the novelists translated into Russian and Chinese were: Ri Ki-yong, 1895–1984). Hong Myong-hui, 1888–1968) writer of () based on the life of the Korean nationalist hero Im Kkokjong (died 1562). Han Sorya author of the novella Jackals (1951).
Works published in , the Korean Writers' Alliance's monthly literary journal, are accessible by subscription abroad.