The poet and writer now known as Kim Chi-Ha (chiha means ‘underground’) was born in 1941 in Mŏkp’o and originally received the name Yŏng-Il. He graduated from the Department of Esthetics in Seoul National University in 1966. He was a student activist and spent 4 months in prison in 1964 for demonstrating against the establishment of diplomatic relations with Japan. His first published poem was 황톳길 (hwangt’o-kil, dirt track, 1969). On the publication of 오적 (ojŏk, five bandits) in 1970, he was charged under the anti-communist law and imprisoned. In 1974, he was condemned to death as an accomplice in the People’s Revolutionary Party Incident, this was then commuted to life imprisonment but the sentence was suspended and he was released in February 1975. Re-arrested a month later on further charges, he was again sentenced and was only released in December 1980. These were the years in which his name became known across the world as a “prisoner of conscience” and an imprisoned writer, the subject of international campaigns by International P.E.N, Amnesty, etc. A small selection of his poems were published in Japan in Japanese translation as part of this campaign and a number of foreign correspondants in Tokyo translated some of them into English. These were for many years the only English translations of his work available and although more translations have now been published, they mostly fail to transmit his true power.

His physical and mental health were seriously compromised by his prolonged imprisonment and in the years following 1980 he began to develop a new synthesis of Christian and oriental thought centered on respect for life. Intensely individual, he refused to play the politically dissendent role many expected of him and became increasingly isolated. While his prose writings mystified many by their strange terminology, his poems lost the earlier note of intense satire and often seemed facile or sentimental. With the passage of time he has become a revered but remote senior writer, and there seems to be little that unites the prophetic, satirical writer of the 1970s with the “one-man Donghak Party” of the new century, whose writings are loaded with unfamiliar Chinese terms often drawn from abstruse metaphysical treatises of earlier times. In recent years he has begun to write extensively in a visionary vein, using a non-scientific eco-biological / life-science terminology and inventing a vast new vocabulary related to his central notion of “san’al,” the central cell-like seed and source of life within each being.