Artist Residency | 2025 | Bucheon Residency | Project

2025 Bucheon Residency for Literary Artists from UNESCO Cities of Literature

Each year, Bucheon hosts an international residency for writers from UNESCO Cities of Literature, selected through an open call. The residency provides time, space, and opportunities for writers to pursue their creative work while experiencing Bucheon's literary and cultural landscape.
As one of the representative collaborative initiatives within the UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN), the residency encourages literary exchange, supports artistic development, and strengthens international connections among UNESCO Cities of Literature.

Hugh Madden

<Hugh Madden>

Hugh Madden is a Dublin-based comics creator whose work draws inspiration from Irish history, mythology, and folklore. His current project, An Sean Bhean Bhocht (The Poor Old Woman), is a folk-horror graphic novel set in 1890s Ireland that explores the role of older women during Ireland's struggle for liberation and decolonization.
Madden has created more than 1,500 pages of published and self-published comics, making him one of Ireland's most prolific comics artists. His works include Birdsong, an adaptation of Honoré de Balzac's The Message set in nineteenth-century Dublin; The King of Dublin's Daughter, a children's adventure; and O'er These Muddied Waters, which explores multicultural Viking-era Dublin through multiple perspectives.
Since 2015, Madden has also contributed to the Dublin Canvas project, creating public artworks featuring figures such as Molly Malone, Jonathan Swift, and other notable Irish historical figures.

During his residency in Bucheon, Madden participated in cultural events including the Bucheon Diaspora Literature Award ceremony and forum, and led a workshop for students at the Korea Webtoon Academy.

Suji Kwock Kim

<Suji Kwock Kim>

Suji Kwock Kim is the author of Notes from the Divided Country, which received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Whiting Writers' Award, the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Association/Northern California Book Award, and The Nation / Discovery Award. The collection was also a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize.
She is also the author of Private Property, a multimedia play performed at Playwrights Horizons in New York and at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe; Notes from the North, recipient of the UK's International Book & Pamphlet Award; and Disorient: Fugues & Assimilamentations (forthcoming from Chatto & Windus/Penguin Random House UK and W. W. Norton in the United States).
Kim is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and serves as a Trustee of the UK Charity Commission and CNK (formerly the European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea), based in New Malden, Surrey, home to the world's largest community of North Korean refugees outside Asia.

During her residency in Bucheon, Kim engaged with the city's literary community while continuing her creative work and participating in cultural exchange programs that explored literature, diaspora, identity, and the role of storytelling across cultures.

About the Bucheon Residency

Suji Kwock Kim

“I loved my Bucheon residency experience, and would happily return someday, if the stars align. Every morning, walking from the residence building to the subway station, I would see the hanok and the sun slanting through bamboo trees. During the first part of the residency, I attended the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award ceremony and reception, had meetings and lunches with Bucheon Diaspora Literary Forum panels, participated in the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Forum. I gave a poetry reading and Q&A in Bucheon City Hall, taught a workshop for the local Bucheon literary community in the Library, prepared new classes and conducted job interviews for next year, attended Nobel Week events at Yonsei University, and saw my great-grandfather Kim Yoongyung's statue there, met some of his former students, local professors, graduate students, journalists and writers in Bucheon and Seoul.
During the second part of the residency, I reconnected with family in Seoul and Suwon and for new work, researched contemporary Korean art and architecture and culture and Buddhist temples researched Sudaemoon Prison where my mother's grandfather was imprisoned and tortured. I also did a research trip to the DMZ.
People who experienced the Japanese occupation of Korea first hand, like my great-grandfather, or the Korean War, like my parents, aunts, uncles ― people now in their 80s or 90s ― are passing away. We, their children and grandchildren, didn’t live through the war ourselves, but we live inside its consequences. Poetry tries to save what it can by refusing to forget. It explores the long aftermath of war and dictatorship: how memory persists after death, how love persists after death, like a kind of afterlife, a heaven.
A poem is small, finite, a few lines holding what history erases, but at the same time it’s infinite, unending, holding what can never be erased, what will always be missed. We never learned what happened to my father’s father in North Korea. We never learned what happened to my mother’s uncle's 2 oldest children. Their absence, and the presence of their absence, became the soil of my life. I try to write my way into that silence by listening, learning, seeing, seeking, imagining what can’t be known. After death or disappearance, what remains? What can still cross borders, when human beings cannot?“