"It stirred a serious excitement, as if the Korean literary scene were on the verge of a new heyday."

This was the judges' evaluation of the winning entries of the "2012 Garam Lee Byung-gi Youth Poetry Award and Choi Myung-hee Youth Fiction Award," a contest jointly sponsored by Jeonbuk National University (JBNU) University Press & Broadcasting Service and the Honbul Memorial Association. It indicates that the poetry and fiction entries in both the high school and university divisions were of very high quality.

The winners of the Lee Byung-gi and Choi Myung-hee Youth Literary Awards, the country's largest university literary competition open to high school and college students nationwide, were selected, and an award ceremony was held on October 31 in the 8th-floor conference room of the University Headquarters.

For the Choi Myung-hee Youth Fiction Award, Yang I-seok (4th-year Creative Writing major, Dongguk University) won the university-division prize for "Montage," and Jung Yoo-jin (3rd-year, Goyang Arts High School) won the high-school-division prize for "The King of Stray Dogs."

The Garam Lee Byung-gi Youth Poetry Award was given to Im Kyung-heon (4th-year, Department of Korean Language & Literature, JBNU) in the university division for "Petal Bait," and to Kim Kyung-min (2nd-year, Anyang Arts High School) in the high school division for "A Single Walnut."

As the country's largest such competition, this year's contest drew 550 poetry submissions from 148 entrants and 110 fiction submissions from 105 entrants, creating fierce competition.

"Montage," the university-division fiction winner, portrays a detective who composes montages and experiences terror in his own face as he becomes entangled in conflicts with his family. Critics praised it as a fine work that literaryizes the moment when the familiar becomes strange and shows that such terror is immanent in everyday life. The high-school-division winner, "The King of Stray Dogs," was lauded for the author's boldness, displaying sophisticated technique and inventive imagination that is hard to believe came from a high school student.

The university-division poetry winner, "Petal Bait," was praised for its powerful control of poetic conception, and the high-school-division winner, "A Single Walnut," also received overall acclaim for its apt diction, imagination, and the ability to weave its poetic ideas together.

Jang Seong-su, the chair of the judging panel, commented, "Many of the submitted poems tenaciously clung to their subjects and sought to embody them in materialized language, and the novels each displayed a distinct personality with clear traces of an effort to breathe life into the sentences. Their perspectives on life were not facile; rather than implying a bleak future for Korean letters, they stirred an excitement as if the Korean literary scene might be approaching a new golden age."

President Seo Geo-seok said, "Now in its 12th year, this competition has become a source of pride for JBNU, having discovered prominent new writers such as Son Hong-gyu, Jeon A-ri, Lee Hye-mi, and Baek Sang-woong. I sincerely congratulate the winners and believe they will help lead our nation's literary scene onto the world stage."

Meanwhile, this competition traces its roots to the "Student Works Contest" held in 1955 to commemorate the first anniversary of the Jeonbuk National University Newspaper's founding, and was launched in its current form in 2001. With total prize money of 6,500,000 won, it is the largest university literary award in the country.