A statue of King Sejong the Great, who created Korean script, in 1446, sits in Gwanghwamun Square, in Seoul. PHOTOGRAPH BY Q. SAKAMAKI / REDUX

In Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Square, a shining bronze statue of King Sejong the Great, the fourth ruler of the Joseon dynasty, presides over twelve lanes of traffic. Behind him sits the Gyeongbokgung Palace compound, today home to the National Palace Museum. Out of a long list of notable accomplishments—sponsoring the invention of the rain gauge, ensuring maternity leave for serfs—King Sejong is most fondly remembered for creating Korean script, hangul, an event celebrated by a national holiday, observed every October in South Korea. “There are many simpleminded people who cannot express themselves even if they have things to say,” he proclaimed when introducing the alphabet, in 1446. “Taking pity on them, I have made 28 letters, only hoping that all our people learn them easily and use them comfortably every day.” With the creation of hangul, Koreans no longer had to struggle to use Chinese characters, or hanja, for written expression. Later rulers would try to ban hangul, because they thought the language made it too_ _easy to share information. (It became the national script for good after the Second World War.) But Sejong’s love for the written word was allegedly so great that he suffered from eye disorders later in life, the result of “excessive reading.”

A certain reverence for the written word is still visible in South Korean culture. Seoul’s largest bookstore carries the high-minded slogan “Men create books, but books create men.” The country has a literacy rate of ninety-eight per cent. Before the MERS outbreak forced the event to be rescheduled, the organizers of last fall’s Seoul International Book Fair expected four hundred thousand people to attend the five-day festival, in Gangnam. (Ultimately, only fifty thousand attended.) The country’s publishing industry does $2.7 billion in annual sales and operates largely out of a government-sponsored complex called Paju Book City, where there are offices for two hundred and fifty publishing houses, with high ceilings and wide windows overlooking trees, reeds, and winding creeks. The complex is set to sprawl over three hundred and seventy acres when it’s completed. According to its mission statement, “The city aims to recover the lost humanity.”

South Korean publishers reportedly release nearly forty thousand new titles each year. How many of those books Koreans actually read is, of course, up for debate. A widely circulated 2005 survey, conducted by a British market-research group, placed Korea last among thirty global powers in hours spent reading per person. (The U.S. placed twenty-third; India was first.) In the past half decade, the Korean government launched a campaign to increase the use of public libraries and promote reading in schools—but students who went to school in South Korea in the eighties and nineties recall a different attitude. “In Korea, reading literature is considered extracurricular, and by the time you get to middle school or high school—when I was in school fifteen, twenty years ago—it was considered a waste of time,” thirty-four-year-old Jung Bum Hur, now a translator, said. “If you were reading a novel, it was ‘Oh, you’re wasting your time. You should be solving math problems; you should be taking another mock exam for the Korean SAT.’ ”

Today, the government is not only encouraging young people to read but also trying to get non-Koreans to read Korean books. Across the street from Gwanghwamun Square, the Literature Translation Institute of Korea recently held its fourteenth annual workshop for the translation and publication of Korean literature. With a budget of ten million dollars and eighty employees, L.T.I. Korea—a subsidiary of Korea’s Ministry of Tourism, Culture, and Sport—is dedicated to increasing the circulation of Korean literature in translation around the world. For 2015’s conference, on the “Global Promotion of K-Books” (think K-pop, but for books), the L.T.I. flew in publishers, translators, editors, and lawyers from the United States, Japan, Russia, Singapore, and the U.K. A team of interpreters sat in darkened booths in the back of the conference room, translating the speakers’ presentations in and out of multiple languages in real-time for attendees clutching small black earpieces.

The annual workshop is one of many initiatives that L.T.I. Korea runs out of a five-story building in the Gangnam district. It hosts free translation courses, puts out a quarterly prospectus of new titles in translation, subsidizes the translation and publication of Korean titles abroad, and frequently sends South Korean writers to literary events around the world. The agency has grand ambitions. “Both Chinese and Japanese writers have already received the Nobel Prize,” its president, Kim Seong-kon, wrote in the Korea Herald_,_ in 2012. “I believe it is about time that a Korean writer is given the prestigious prize as well.”

That ambition is shared by a fair number of Kim’s countrymen. With a G.D.P. of $1.4 trillion, South Korea has the world’s thirteenth-largest economy, trailing Australia and Canada. But while Canada and Australia have had twenty-two and thirteen Nobel laureates, respectively, South Korea has had just one (President Kim Dae-jung, who won the 2000 Peace Prize), putting it behind the likes of Luxembourg, East Timor, and St. Lucia (which have each had two). Writing in the Korea Times shortly after 2015’s prize announcements were made, the former California congressman Jay Kim, who was born in South Korea, lamented his motherland’s failure, once again, to produce a Nobel laureate in any category. “It is rather an embarrassing lack of achievement for this economic powerhouse,” he wrote.

Korea isn’t the only country whose government has taken an active role in making its literature more visible to the Nobel committee. Before the Chinese-born novelist and playwright Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2000, the Chinese government led a semi-formal campaign, for nearly thirty years, to win the prize—an effort Julia Lovell chronicles in “The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature.” The Nobel was seen, Lovell writes, as something that would “affirm China as a powerful, modern, international civilization.” But Gao’s win did little to assuage China’s Nobel anxiety: there are dissident strains in his work, and he is a naturalized French citizen.

On a smaller scale, government-funded translation institutes can be found in many other countries, working to find global audiences for the literature of their homelands. “Denmark is fantastic; Norway is really good; the German book office is very effective,” Chad Post, the publisher of Open Letter, a nonprofit literary-translation press affiliated with the University of Rochester, told me. Post has worked with a number of such institutes. “The Estonian literature center, the Latvian literature center—a lot of these countries that have languages that aren’t as widely spoken tend to put a lot of emphasis on and do a good job of organizing those literary centers so they have a chance.” Where Korea’s effort differs, however, is in its budget and scope. “They have a lot more money than those other countries, but the thing that I think sets them apart is they have this training.” In Post’s view, the L.T.I.’s programs for translators, and its habit of commissioning full translations of works irrespective of any publishing house’s interest, make its efforts unique.

To win the Nobel, South Korea must first produce books the Nobel committee can read, and the pressure to do that falls squarely on the L.T.I. Yun Jang, a literature enthusiast I met at last year’s International Book Fair, said that the failure to capture the Nobel was related to “translation issues.” “It’s a very sophisticated language, Korean. Personally, I believe there’s lots of good literature in Korea. It’s frustrating. I think the Nobel committee needs to learn Korean first. Then a Korean will win the prize.”