RICHARD E. KIM, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was born in 1932 in Hamheung in North Korea. After serving in the Republic of (South) Korea Marines and Army, 1950–54, he was honorably discharged as first lieutenant, Infantry in 1954 and came to the United States in 1955.

He was educated at Middlebury College, where he studied political science and history, 1955–59; at Johns Hopkins University (M.A. in writing, 1960); at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop (M.F.A., 1962); and at Harvard University (M.A., Far Eastern languages and literature, 1963).

His academic experience includes various professorships in English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Syracuse University, San Diego State University, and at Seoul National University, where he was a Fulbright professor, 1981–83.

He has received a Ford Foundation Foreign Area Fellowship (1962–63), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1966), the First Award, Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards (1974), a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowship (1978–79), and other awards and honors.

His published original works include the novels The Martyred (1964) and The Innocent (1968); a children’s story, A Blue Bird (in Korean, 1983); In Search of Lost Years (in Korean, 1985), and Lost Koreans in China and the Soviet Union: Photo-Essays (1989). His television work, for KBS-TV of Seoul, includes 200 Years of Christianity in Korea (1981), The Korean War (1983), On Japan (1984), Reflections on the Wartime Massacres (1985), A Passage to Manchuria (1987), In Search of Lost Koreans in the Soviet Union (1988), and The Great Trans-Siberian Railway (1989). He was a columnist for The Korea Herald and The Chosun Ilbo (Korean Daily) in Seoul, 1981–84.