Lee Kang-baek Lee Kang-baek Lee Kang-Baek (born December 1, 1947) is a South Korean playwright. Lee Kang-Baek was born on December 1, 1947 in Jeonju, North Jeolla Province, South Korea Lee recounts that as a youth he was shocked to discover from French nouveaux romans and Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot that literary works could have unclear plotlines and circular plot structures. His early love for such works highly influenced his own literary productions. Lee has published roughly thirty dramas, all in the anti-realist style. Lee writes dramas almost exclusively, and most of his work has been staged. This attests to the
Nobel Prize in Literature of the gesture. He was a candidate for the Nobel Prize in 1904, to be shared with the Provençal writer Frédéric Mistral, in recognition of their contributions to literature in non-official languages. Political pressure from Spain's central government having made this prize impossible, it was eventually awarded to Mistral and to the Spanish language playwright José Echegaray. The choice of Selma Lagerlöf (Sweden 1858–1940) as Nobel Laureate in 1909 (for the 'lofty idealism, vivid imagination and spiritual perception that characterizes her writings') followed fierce debate because of her writing style and subject matter, which broke literary decorums of the time.