Books built simply, firmly, and gracefully, to outlast us
Home to the complete works of Park Nohae
Founded in 2002, Slow Walking is an independent Korean publisher of poetry, essays, and photography. We publish books not for a season, but for a lifetime.
Flagship Author — Park Nohae (1957~)
Poet, photographer, revolutionary — and more
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
Featured Title
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.
From Reading While Walking Along
— Park Nohae, translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé
Do not love work,
make love work.
― 37p
Youth is dangerous.
Not because it destroys the world
but because it creates the world.
― 73p
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.
― 543p
A new poem and a new photograph, every day on:
instagram.com/park_nohae
For full descriptions of these and every other title, download our Rights Guide
Sample English translations are available on request
Contact
For rights enquiries and sample translations
Slow Walking
+82-2-733-3773
3F, 63 Jahamun-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea
