Slow Walking
An independent Korean publisher of books made to be kept for life
Founded in 2002, Slow Walking keeps a deliberately small list.
We build each book SIMPLY, FIRMLY, and GRACEFULLY
— as if building the one structure that will stand on this earth.
Flagship Author — Park Nohae
In 1984, a twenty-seven-year-old factory worker published a book of poems under a pseudonym meaning "liberation of labor." It was banned at once. It sold a million copies.
For years the dictatorship hunted the "Faceless Poet." When they finally caught him, prosecutors demanded death — and he smiled. That photograph is now one of the iconic images of modern Korea.
He served seven and a half years in a cell three steps wide. Pardoned in 1998, he refused all compensation, picked up a camera, and walked — for over two decades, through villages on no map, recording truth with an old film camera and a fountain pen. Today he posts a photograph and a poem every day to more than 120,000 followers worldwide.
His debut, Dawn of Labor, was published in English by the University of Hawai'i Press in 2024 — four decades after it first shook the nation that banned it.
"This translation of Park Nohae's first collection of poems could not arrive at a more propitious moment. This 'faceless poet,' this 'enemy of the state,' is not only a legendary figure in Korean letters and society but a prophet of global liberation. These poems clarify what we most need to know, wherever we may find ourselves in the world."
— Christopher Merrill, American poet and former director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, on Dawn of Labor (University of Hawai'i Press, 2024)
For readers of Pablo Neruda and Mahmoud Darwish.
Further reading
Park Nohae: Poet Militant, Poet Inspirational — an essay by his translator, Brother Anthony of Taizé, in Asymptote
asymptotejournal.com
Featured Titles
Reading While Walking Along
Aphorisms · 423 pieces · 880 pages · 110×165mm · Cloth-bound · 2021
A lifetime of walking in thought, distilled into 423 aphorisms you can hold in one hand. Park Nohae calls his lifelong practice "Reading While Walking Along" — a way of reading that deepened in a solitary cell where three steps was all the world allowed. Cloth-bound in sky-blue and small enough for a coat pocket, the book has the heft of a pocket bible, yet each page holds a single aphorism in generous white space.
Seeing Your Heaven
Poetry · 528 pages · 127×204mm · Cloth-bound · 2022
301 poems from a journey in search of light — "Each of us has a heaven of our own." Forty years after his banned debut, this is where the poet has arrived. The poems move from birth to death, from love to resistance, from the smallest daily thing to the cosmic — a spectrum so wide it seems impossible one person wrote it.
The Tear-Flowering Boy
Essays · 33 pieces · 256 pages · 126×188mm · Cloth-bound · 2024
With pencil drawings by the author
A childhood so vivid it reads like a film — one boy's story, and the memory of an entire generation. Before he became the poet who shook a nation, Park Nohae was a boy in a remote southern village: the mountains, fields, and sea where he once ran return here as vividly as the scent of camellias in winter. Each piece stands on its own, and together they hold a way of life that has since vanished from Korea.
The Blue Light Girl
Poetry Picture Book · 72 pages · 148×210mm · Hardcover · 2020
A visitor from a distant star asks a poet of Earth the fundamental question. A girl of blue light arrives from a distant planet and asks: what is good on Earth? Park Nohae answers in poems that open a child's imagination toward a world far larger than our own, and reach adults just as deeply. Twenty-nine paintings by the Russian avant-garde master Kazimir Malevich, chosen by the poet himself, meet the text as if the two imaginations had been waiting a century for each other.
Ra Wilderness
Photography · 120 pages · 210×190mm · Softcover · 2010
Trilingual captions (Korean / English / Arabic)
Before the wars sealed them shut: ten years in the Middle East, captured through the lens of peace. "Ra" is an ancient word for the sun — and for the sun-like hope of people who keep rising to their feet even on the land of war. Thirty-seven photographs chosen from more than 40,000 taken across Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan, seen by a poet who walked in not as a journalist but as a brother. There is no spectacle of suffering here, only dignity.
From Reading While Walking Along
— Park Nohae, translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé
Do not love work,
make love work.
Youth is dangerous.
Not because it destroys the world
but because it creates the world.
What we have to make are not plans.
It’s a firm rule of life.
Let trust and entrust all the rest.
For between the cracks in plans
and the blanks in voids,
come the wonder of journeying
and the mystery of relationship.
A new photograph and a new poem, every day on:
Rights Guide — Frankfurt 2026
Full and sample English translations are available on request for selected titles.
Contact
For rights enquiries and sample translations
Co-agent BC Agency [[contact person · email]]
Slow Walking
3F, 63 Jahamun-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea
