A poet laureate, a state propagandist, a state historian ― writer Jang Jin-sung, whose memoir “Dear Leader” about his life in North Korea was published in English in the U.K. in May, was all this before he escaped North Korea in 2004 at the age of 34.



By his account, Jang’s life in the North was comfortable, materially at least. As leader Kim Jong-il’s favorite poet, Jang was given the task of writing epic poems honoring the Dear Leader. His flair for writing found him employed by the United Front Department responsible for inter-Korean espionage, policy-making and diplomacy, where he wrote under the names of South Korean publishers that would eventually be passed on to democratic resistance movements in the South. At one point, he was part of an eight-member team of writers charged with compiling the “Annals of the Kim Dynasty” as a state historian.



The cover of Jang’s “Dear Leader,” a memoir published in the U.K. by Random House Group



All seemed well until that fateful day in January 2004 when Jang and his friend found themselves with nowhere to go but across the Tumen River into China to escape what would surely be execution for smuggling a South Korean monthly magazine out of the UFD office.



When Jang made the escape, he was carrying with him two notebooks of poems. The poems dealt with mass starvation, a mother trying to sell her daughter in a marketplace, the general misery of the people and the worsening tyranny of the North Korean regime ― an eyewitness account of what was happening inside one of the most reclusive and repressive states in the world. The heartfelt poems were written in secret, in the evening hours after Jang returned from a day of writing lies.



During the day, Jang worked in a bubble of mocked-up South Korea, writing praises of Kim Jong-il from the viewpoint of a South Korean writer. “It was creative writing, using South Korean expressions. It involved having to lie twice,” said Jang at the New Focus International office in a rundown building in northeastern Seoul on June 10. New Focus International is a website on North Korean news that he founded in 2011.



The discrepancy between the lies he had to write and the reality he witnessed and turned into poems suffocated Jang to the point where he wanted desperately to do something to disrupt the surface calm of his life. “I wanted to break the traffic law, at the very least,” he said, so restless and stifled and yet powerless he felt. “I even wished for something bad to happen to the regime,” he said.



It was purely by chance that Jang’s writing talent was discovered. Jang who was studying music at the Pyongyang Arts School, happened upon a collection of poems by the British Romantic poet Lord Byron, including “The Corsair.”



Writer Jang Jin-sung speaks at the New Focus International office in northeastern Seoul. Behind him is a satellite image of Pyongyang. (Park Hyun-koo/ The Korea Herald)