Jeong Ha-yeon

Jeong Ha-yeon was born Jeong Yeon on 20 April 1944 in Anak, Hwanghae Province, in present-day North Korea. At Yongsan High School he joined the drama club, but found he could not memorise lines and gave up acting.

He went on to study Korean language and literature at Yonsei University, where he was a member of the student theatre society, the Yonhui Theatre Arts Research Society. He left the university without completing his degree.

Jeong's play Echo of the Mountain won the Seoul Shinmun New Year literary contest in 1968, when he was 24, and he won a new writer's prize for another full-length play the same year. In 1969 his play Fantasy Murder won a playwriting competition run by the Kyunghyang Shinmun, and in 1973 he received the playwriting prizes of the Dong-A Theatre Awards and the Baeksang Arts Awards. He wrote screenplays for films including A Story of Love, directed by the actor Shin Seong-il, and wrote radio dramas for MBC before moving into television, including episodes of KBS's Legend of the Hometown and TV Literature Hall.

In 1988 he gave up writing and went to the United States, where his family lived, believing that a new era in Korea needed new writers. He came back after two years and returned to television in 1990 with The End of Love, an adaptation of Sidney Sheldon's Rage of Angels.

From 1995, beginning with KBS's Jang Nok-su, he wrote a run of large-scale historical dramas: Jo Gwang-jo, The King and the Queen and Empress Myeongseong for KBS, and Shin Don for MBC in 2005. He also wrote the EBS cultural history dramas Count of Myeongdong (2003) and Still the Marronnier (2005), remade his own earlier drama Wife in 2003, and wrote modern serials including Desire on Sand, Sea of Desire, Sweet Life and Flames of Desire. In 2011 he wrote Empress Insoo, the launch drama of the cable channel JTBC, and later returned to palace intrigue with Court of the Damned: War of the Flowers. His last work was the 2018 MBC drama Hold My Hand and Look at the Setting Sun.

Jeong's daughter is the actress Jeong Yo-sook. In the late 1980s his family lived in the United States, where he joined them for about two years before returning to Korea.

Jeong Ha-yeon died at about 3 p.m. on 1 November 2026, aged 82, surrounded by his family and friends. According to the Korea Broadcasting Writers Association and his family, he had gone to a hospital emergency room on 31 October because of a chronic illness; the specific cause of death was not made public. His death was reported on 2 November, the day of the funeral of the actor Choi Bool-am, and Korean media noted the loss of two leading figures of the country's broadcasting within three days. His mourning room was set up at the Soonchunhyang University Seoul Hospital funeral hall in Yongsan-gu, Seoul, with the funeral procession scheduled for 4 November.

Jeong is remembered as one of the defining writers of the Korean historical drama, who led its golden age on KBS and MBC from the mid-1990s through the 2000s. Works such as The King and the Queen and Empress Myeongseong brought the women of the Joseon court and the politics of the palace to a mass television audience, and Shin Don explored the ideals and failures of a reformer. His contemporary dramas about desire, ruin and family conflict showed a wider range, and his career, from prize-winning playwright in 1968 to his final drama in 2018, spanned the growth of Korean television itself.