The North Korean writer who invented the cult of Kim Il Sung

Ideas & Philosophy · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Han Sorya was the architect of the North Korean personality cult, transforming Kim Il Sung into a national deity through his literature. Though his name was later erased from official history, his anti-American novella Jackals remains a foundational text, shaping the regime's rhetoric and worldview for over seventy years.

Born in 1900, Han Sorya rose from an obscure writer to become the most powerful cultural administrator in North Korea. After the country's liberation, he quickly positioned himself as the primary hagiographer of Kim Il Sung. By 1946, he had coined the titles 'our Sun' and 'Sun of the Nation' to describe the leader. Han’s influence was so profound that Kim’s 1955 'Juche speech' explicitly credited him with uncovering ideological errors within the literary establishment, effectively using Han to purge rival factions.

Han’s most enduring legacy is his 1951 novella, Jackals. The story, which depicts American missionaries murdering a Korean boy, is treated as historical fact in North Korea. It is credited with popularizing the term 'jackals' as a synonym for Americans—a label still used in state media today. Critics like B. R. Myers argue that the novella’s success stems not from socialist realism, but from its roots in colonial-era anti-Christian propaganda and wartime Japanese tropes, which Han repurposed to serve the regime’s political needs.

Despite his central role in building the state’s cultural apparatus, Han was not immune to the purges he helped orchestrate. In 1962, he was accused of 'parochialism' and 'bourgeois decadence,' leading to his expulsion from the party and exile. While his name was scrubbed from official records, his works continued to be disseminated. The regime eventually adopted a policy of anonymous authorship to avoid the embarrassment of promoting a disgraced figure, yet Han’s influence persists, and he even appeared as a heroic figure in the 1990s film Nation and Destiny.

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