The year she turned 23, she won the criticism category of the Dong-A Ilbo New Year literary contest. The next year, the year she turned 24, she debuted as a poet in the fall issue of the quarterly Literature and Intellect. In 1981 she published her first collection, From Another Star.
From 1989 she taught creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. In 1997 she won the Kim Su-yeong Literature Award for A Poor Love Machine. In 2000 she won the Sowol Poetry Prize.
In 2004 she published her eighth collection, A Drink of Red Mirror. In 2006 she won the Midang Literary Award.
In 2008 she published her ninth collection, Your First, and in November it was selected for the poetry category of the 16th Daesan Literary Award. In 2011 she published her tenth collection, Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream.
In 2016 she published Autobiography of Death. In 2018 the English edition of the collection came out in the United States.
The breakthrough yearThe year she turned 64, she won the Griffin Poetry Prize in Canada, international category, for Autobiography of Death. It came 40 years after her debut, and Newsis writes that she was the first Korean to win.
In 2021 she left her post at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. In 2022 she received the Samsung Ho-Am Prize in the Arts and was named an International Writer by the Royal Society of Literature. In 2023 the English edition of Phantom Pain Wings came out in the United States.
The year she turned 69, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry for Phantom Pain Wings. In 2025 she won the International Literature Prize of the HKW in Germany and published a new collection. In 2026 she published the essay collection Gongjungui Bokhwasul, and in September she was selected for the main prize of the Nojak Literary Award.
Kim Hyesoon (born 1955) debuted in the quarterly Literature and Intellect in 1979, the year she turned 24, and became known on Jun 6, 2019, the year she turned 64, when she won the Griffin Poetry Prize in Canada, international category. She won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2024, the year she turned 69.
Ages are by calendar year (the year minus the birth year), birthdays aside.