INU Institute for Foundational Education Lecturer Lee Tae-hee Wins Hwang Sun-won Literary Award

- Honored in the domestic category for his dica-poetry collection Underlining the Blue Book… Award ceremony held at Sonagi Village on September 11

Incheon National University (INU), led by President Injae Lee, announced that Lee Tae-hee, a lecturer at the Institute for Foundational Education, was selected as the winner of the domestic category of the “Hwang Sun-won Dica-Poetry Laureate Award” at the 15th Hwang Sun-won Literary Awards.

Organized by the Hwang Sun-won Memorial Association and hosted by Yangpyeong County, Kyung Hee University, and JoongAng Ilbo, the Hwang Sun-won Literary Awards annually recognize writers who have demonstrated outstanding literary achievement in fiction and poetry. At this year’s 15th awards, novelist Kang Shin-seong received the Writer Award and Cho Ji-eun the Emerging Writer Award in the fiction category. In poetry, Lee Tae-hee received the domestic Dica-Poetry Laureate Award, Park Woo-min the overseas Dica-Poetry Laureate Award, and Park Ja-bang the Grand Prize of the Yangpyeong Literary Award.

Lee received the award for his dica-poetry collection Underlining the Blue Book, which explores the inner dimensions of existence through a delicate poetic gaze, as though drawing lines beneath the sky, earth, seasons, and everyday objects. Divided into four sections—spring, summer, autumn, and winter—the collection is Lee’s second book of dica poetry, published approximately two years after his first collection, Flower Truck, in 2023.

The award ceremony was held at 1 p.m. on September 11 at Sonagi Village in the Hwang Sun-won Literature Village in Seojong-myeon, Yangpyeong County, Gyeonggi Province. The ceremony was held as part of the 23rd Hwang Sun-won Literary Festival and was attended by former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, writers, and local community representatives.

Born in Nonsan, Chungcheongnam-do, in 1963, Lee made his literary debut in 1988 after receiving the New Writer Award in the poetry category from the monthly literary magazine Dongseo Literature. He studied Korean Language and Literature at Incheon National University and Kyung Hee University, earning his master’s degree with a thesis on speakers in the poetry of Kim Soo-young and his doctorate with a dissertation on the creative methods of poet Jeong Ji-yong.

Lee currently teaches “Theory and Practice of Writing in the AI Era” at INU’s Institute for Foundational Education. He also serves as an executive committee member of the Korean Dica-Poetry Association and an editorial board member of the quarterly World Dica-Poetry. He has published numerous works, including the poetry collection Long-Ripened Love (2001), and received the Poetry and Prose Literary Award in 2017.

Lecturer Lee Tae-hee with the Hwang Sun-won Literary Award plaque