My Name Is Loh Kiwan (Korean novel)

My Name Is Loh Kiwan (Novel in Korean) (로기완을 만났다) is a Korean novel about a young North Korean defector who flees to Belgium seeking asylum.

Written by Cho Hae-jin and published by Changbi Publishers in the Changbi Remastered Story Selection series, this remastered edition (16 February 2024, 244 pages, in Korean) follows the trail of Loh Kiwan, a 20-year-old who defected from North Korea and arrived as a stowaway in Brussels with the sole wish of surviving.

The story is told through a reporter who travels to Belgium and reconstructs Kiwan's reality by reading his diary, creating a bridge of empathy between reader and protagonist. The novel explores extreme survival, the struggle to obtain refugee status before a hostile bureaucratic system, identity and human compassion, with delicate, restrained prose that avoids melodrama to focus on the characters' psychology. It is the original work on which the Netflix film My Name Is Loh Kiwan (2024), starring Song Joong-ki, is based.

Recommended level: advanced readers, roughly equivalent to TOPIK II levels 5–6 (inferred). As a literary novel written in Korean for native readers, it requires advanced command of the language; the TOPIK level is not stated by the publisher and is an estimate based on the nature of the text.