JAE-WON CHOI

Poet, editor and late-night walker whose small poems made large rooms feel kinder

Choi Jae-won wrote his first poem on the back of a ramyeon packet at the age of eleven and, according to his sister, never stopped writing on packaging. Born in Suwon in 1983, the son of a Samsung engineer and a schoolteacher, he grew up in an apartment where silence meant concentration and where the only sound at night was a parent turning pages. He studied Korean literature at Seoul National University, graduating in 2008, and a year later his poem 'The Last Bus Home' won the Dong-A Ilbo Spring Literary Contest, the debut every Korean poet dreams about.

By day he was an editor at a small independent press in Mapo, bringing other writers' manuscripts to life with a red pencil and a great deal of tenderness, and by night he walked. Seoul at two in the morning was his study: convenience-store coffee, the Han River bridges, strangers waiting for night buses whose faces became stanzas. He published two collections, A Chair for the Light in 2013 and Soft Weather in 2020, and taught a Saturday poetry workshop for high-school students at a neighbourhood library, where he never once corrected a poem without first finding a line to praise. When his father fell ill in 2022, Jae-won read to him every evening, and when his father died he wrote the only elegy he said he could not edit.

He fed stray cats on the roof of his building, left generous tips, kept a notebook of overheard sentences and believed that kindness was a craft that improved with practice. He loved makgeolli on rainy days, old Korean melodramas and arguing gently about line breaks with his partner, Seo-yeon. He passed away on 28 March 2025, aged forty-one, after a brief illness, in the spring he loved best. He leaves his mother, Kim Mi-sook, his sister Min-jung, his partner Han Seo-yeon and a notebook of unfinished poems that his friends are now gathering into a final book.

“A poem is a small room. Make sure there is a chair for whoever walks in.”