Yang Gui-ja (1955–) is a South Korean novelist. Born in Jeonju, North Jeolla Province, she studied Korean literature at Wonkwang University and made her literary debut in 1978 after receiving a new-writer award from the magazine Munhak Sasang. Her fiction portrays the lives of ordinary people and women amid South Korea’s rapid urbanization, and she received the Yi Sang Literary Award in 1992. In “I Wish for What Is Forbidden to Me,” a woman seeking revenge against a male-dominated society abducts and confines a popular actor, setting ideals of women’s liberation against the tangled realities of affection, violence, and control.
