SLA Buff Blog: Minsoo Kang

The Saint Louis Author (SLA) Buff blog highlights the unique and surprising authors who live and write in Mound City.

Sky baby.

The green and yellow foliage of the mountain shimmered brightly under the afternoon sun, giving the place the appearance of a marvelous jewel that was also a colossal living being--Minsoo Kang, The Melancholy of Untold History (William Morrow,2024)

This past August, Minsoo Kang’s debut novel The Melancholy of Untold History won the 2024 Mythopoeic Award for literature and literary studies, given annually by the Mythopoeic Society for outstanding works in the field of fantasy. The award goes to the publication that best exemplifies the spirit of the Inklings; a University of Oxford literary group known for reading and discussing the works of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Minsoo began building the foundation for his future award winning novel as a 12-year-old arriving with his diplomatic family in Wellington, New Zealand without a good command of English. He proceeded to spend the summer reading--dictionary in hand-- the biggest book he could find: The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien at 1000 pages. “It was really hard, but I got through it and by the end of the summer, I knew English.”

Minsoo Kang

I first encountered Minsoo at his talk at the Schlafly Branch of St. Louis Public Library marking the July 2025 release of the paperback edition of his novel. An aspiring novelist myself, and of a certain age, I was curious about what he would say about being a debut novelist in his 50s. His credentials--UCLA doctorate in European History at UCLA in 2004, numerous publications in his field as well as stories, and decades of tenure in the History Department of the University of Missouri in St. Louis were intimidating. His charm and conversational style of speaking quickly disarmed the audience.

“I have always written stories,” Minsoo said to the group of about thirty people at the talk, as genial as if we had all been long time friends. “But I learned you can’t write fiction and be a historian at the same time. There just isn’t enough time.”

“The way we defeat AI in fiction writing is to write really weird books. I like to read books that are totally unexpected. Even if it isn’t well-written, I would much rather read something imperfect written in a whole new way than a masterpiece written with the same old plot.”

The Melancholy of Untold History: A Novel by Minsoo Kang

Melancholy combines elements of fictional history, myth, and a modern academic’s experiences within an imagined setting. Delightful details trip from one story to the next, from one millennium to another,in the form of colors and landscape—a mountain group called the Four Verdant Mothers is always on the horizon, and the reader is reminded of the mountains’ colors throughout—Red God, Blue God, yellow raincoat, green traffic light. A Sky Baby rides a dragon, and a purple fart cloud keeps the reader guessing.

To write, Minsoo needs complete quiet and solitude to concentrate. He wrote Melancholy in four months after thinking about it for years. He wrote a draft of his next novel in four weeks. He tries not to leave his home and depends on his cat to hit him on the back of the head to stop working. “I get annoyed when I have to stop to get food,” he said.

I asked Minsoo how he felt when he got the academic job offer from UMSL. “It was a massive relief. Academics is very competitive, and getting a tenure track job was, even then, extremely competitive. Even more so, now. I had always lived in large cities, and was coming from LA, so as a smaller city, St. Louis was not what I was used to. When I came for my interview, the department advised me to rent a car at the airport to get a sense of the city. I was excited when I hit Delmar—it seemed like a familiar, university street with bookshops, bars and restaurants. The shock came when I got to the north end of the street after a few blocks. In LA, a street like that goes for miles.”

“It wasn’t the kind of prestigious appointment that some of my friends from UCLA had gotten: Princeton, Notre Dame.” Minsoo said. “I didn’t plan to stay for 20 years, but the more I learned about the challenges of trying to stay ahead at places like that, the stress my friends were under, I realized the advantages of where I had landed. I went back to LA several times after starting my teaching job at UMSL, and on one trip, I realized I had spent more time in traffic than hanging out with my friends.”

“Given the way I grew up, I got used to the idea that I would never belong anywhere. But, as an outsider, I get to see what other people don’t. I’m constantly reminding my Korean friends that they have no idea what it’s like to live in a country this big.” Many of Minsoo’s students come from rural Missouri, and he is grateful to have learned Louis is itself a big deal. They come from communities where one or two families own most of the town, including the police and local politics. “There is nothing like that in Korea; everything there is very connected.”

At the beginning of the interview, Minsoo and I determined that St. Louis is the place he has lived the longest in his nomadic life, so his status as an outsider may be in jeopardy. His next novel takes place on a college campus, with a few scenes in St. Louis. We will have to wait and see.

You can purchase a paperback version of The Melancholy of Untold History at Left Bank Books and anywhere fiction is sold.