Preface Poem 1. Barren Earth A New Arirang for the North Green Leaves, Falling Blizzard Bloody Fall A Maiden’s Window Song of the Fire Swallows Chajabi (The Hitchhiker) Ugly, White Snow The Mill on the Mountain New Seongcheon Station 2. Exhausted Heart Song of the Red People Roundabout Blues Toads No Ingredients Blues Idol 50 Years of Red Five Thieves Blues Stepmother The Song of Kim Juseok Heartsick Red Locomotive Night at the Military Camp Affliction in the Red House 3. Longing for You, My Love One Heart Long, Long Winter Nights Ah! KBS Educational Channel My Love How Much I Love You Please Deliver Just This Blow, South Wind This Lonely Life I Awaited You, My Love 4. Attached to a Life Youth is a Forking Road O Azaleas Song of Life Pine Trees Thoughts of Mother Woman of Pure Love Oak Tree in Winter A Man Your Lover 5. Wishes Bandi (Firefly) Landscape White with Snow Why I Love Wildflowers Me for Myself The Whistling Man Today The World Where People Live Open-minded Life Sow Love, Reap Love A Dream Afterword: Bandi’s Dream - Do Hee-yun
Authored by one of North Korea’s most acclaimed dissident writers, this is the first collection of Bandi’s poetry to be published in English.
The author and poet known only as ‘Bandi’ (a pseudonym meaning ‘firefly’) spent his childhood in China before returning to North Korea, the country of his birth, as a young man. Initially writing for North Korean magazines, the focus of Bandi’s writing changed forever after the deaths of many people close to him during the great famine of the 1990s. The experiences of this time made him resolve to share with the outside world a true likeness of the harsh North Korean society as he himself saw it. With the help of a relative, he was able to smuggle a collection of his poems and stories to South Korea. The first part of this manuscript achieved international acclaim when it was published as the short story collection The Accusation: Forbidden Stories From Inside North Korea (2018).
As a collection of poems by an anonymous North Korean dissident
sees the light here for the first time, Katie Law learns the
extraordinary story of how he risked his life to smuggle his work
out of the country ... The Red Years, a slim volume of 51 short
poems, makes for pretty depressing reading, the brutality of life
under Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il expressed even more
crudely than in the stories.
*Evening Standard*
In 'The Red Years', we are shown the possibility of this kind of
communal solidarity persisting. The collection, then, is a fragment
of this private enclave – the ardent defense of an interiority
unbroken by propaganda.
*NK News*
Powerful insights into a world behind walls.
*Praise for Bandi’s The Accusation, Guardian*
Courageous and confounding ... It's a quiet privilege to be given
access to the voiceless by listening to such vivid and
uncompromised storytelling.
*Praise for Bandi’s The Accusation, New Statesman*
A fierce indictment of life in the totalitarian North.
*Praise for Bandi’s The Accusation, New York Times*
Spare, direct, unflinching and bitterly angry.
*Praise for Bandi’s The Accusation, Observer*
Bandi [presents] a world in which North Koreans are nuanced:
broken-hearted, idealistic, still full of life.
*Praise for Bandi’s The Accusation, Times Literary Supplement*
Its very existence is still a hopeful symbol that change is
inevitable, if not imminent.
*Praise for Bandi’s The Accusation, Vice*
Fascinating and chilling. Heartfelt and heartbreaking.
*Praise for Bandi’s The Accusation, Margaret Atwood*
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