Kim Eun Kook,a naturalized U.S. citizen, was born in 1932 in Hamhung in North Korea. After serving in the Republic of South Korea Marines and Army, 1950—54, he was honorably discharged as first lieutenant, Infantry in 1954 and came to the United States in 1955.

He was educated at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he studied political science and history, 1955—59; at Johns Hopkins University (M.A. in writing, 1960); at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop (M.F.A. 1962); and at Harvard University (M.A. in Far Eastern languages and literature, 1963).

The Martyred, Kim's first novel, is a critically acclaimed bestseller about the Korean War, which would be made into a play, an opera, and a film. It was also nominated for a National Book Award. It was followed by The Innocent (1968), about politics in postwar South Korea, and Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood (1970), a collection of stories.

His academic experience included various professorships in English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Syracuse University, San Diego State University, and at Seoul National University, where he was a Fulbright professor, 1981-83.

He received a Ford Foundation Foreign Area Fellowship (1962—63), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1966), the First Award, Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards (1974), a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowship (1978—79), and other awards and honors.

His published original works include the novels The Martyred (1964), The Innocent (1968) and Lost Names (1970); a children's story, "A Blue Bird" (in Korean, 1983); "In Search of Lost Years" (in Korean, 1985), and "Lost Koreans in China and the Soviet Union: Photo-Essays" (1989). His television work, for KBS-TV of Seoul, includes "200 Years of Christianity in Korea" (1981), "The Korean War" (1983), "On Japan" (1984), "Reflections on the Wartime Massacres" (1985), "A Passage to Manchuria" (1987), "In Search of Lost Koreans in the Soviet Union" (1988), and "The Great Trans-Siberian Railway" (1989). He was a columnist for The Korea Herald and The Chosun Ilbo (Korea Daily) in Seoul, 1981-84.