From 2020 to 2022, North Korean literature shows how its COVID-19 policies, discourse, and people’s experiences have changed. First, in 2020, COVID-19 was declared a threat to the socialist system in North Korean literature. Emergency quarantine propaganda was vigorously promoted in the literary field. Second, North Korean literature in the year 2021 called North Korea a ‘clean land’ to justify the country’s quarantine policies, both in a literary and ideological sense. Third, the containment experience during the global pandemic in 2022 was expressed as ‘silence.’ Through the narrative, Kim Jong-un’s disaster leadership was credited for the country’s success in overcoming the challenges of insufficient supplies and poor medical infrastructure with the help of people’s ‘virtue and affection.’ North Korean literature seeks to tackle the crisis and alleviate the mental distress of the people who are reeling from the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, what had been lying in the hidden side ― emotional instability and precarious reality ― are now increasingly becoming visible through the literature.
