SEOUL, South Korea - Like so many South Korean parents at the time, Shin Kyung-sook's mother saw education as her daughter's best chance of escaping poverty. So in 1978 she took her 15-year-old daughter to Seoul, where Ms. Shin would lie about her age to get a factory job while attending high school at night to pursue her dream of becoming a novelist.

Seoul-bound trains at the time picked up many young rural South Koreans along the way - part of the migration that fueled South Korea's industrialization. It is that social upheaval that Ms. Shin evoked in her most famous novel to date, "Please Look After Mom," which earned her the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize and a commercial success attained by few other Korean writers. (The book has been published in 19 other countries.)

That book and a more recent one, "I Will Be Right There," about friendship and love set in the country's political turmoil of the 1980s, are part of a body of work over three decades that has set Ms. Shin apart as one of the most accomplished chroniclers of modern South Korea.

"In her novels, readers have the chance to pause and reflect upon the other side of their society's breakneck race for economic growth, what they have lost in that pursuit and upon people who were left behind in the mad rush," said Shin Soo-jeong, a professor of Korean literature at Myongji University in Seoul.

In "Please Look After Mom," an elderly woman from the countryside travels to Seoul to visit her adult children and gets lost in the scramble to get on a Seoul subway. Reviewers have called her disappearance a metaphor for the profound sense of loss in a society that hurtled from an agrarian dictatorship to an industrialized democracy within a generation.

That feeling has not overwhelmed South Koreans' pride in their country's accomplishments, notably its rise from abject poverty to the world's 13th-largest economy. But the sense of loss taps into a growing unease over some of the costs of that success, especially a widening gap between rich and poor and a generation of elderly people left largely to fend for themselves as their adult children work in cities.

The filial guilt that suffuses the novel has a particularly Korean spin. Until a generation ago in South Korea, at least one adult child - usually the eldest son and his family - lived with aging parents until their deaths. Now, a growing number of older people live alone in their rural villages or in the nursing homes that are springing up across the country. Often, they have little money left, having invested their savings in their children's educations with the expectation that the children would eventually care for them.

The children, meanwhile, living in a hypercompetitive society where people work some of the longest hours in the world, often lament that they are too harried to visit their elderly parents. Many also fear using too much vacation time, afraid of being seen as disloyal to their companies.

In what Ms. Shin says is probably the most important sentence in her novel, the missing mother expresses what many guilt-ridden readers imagine as their own mothers' sense of helplessness at having been effectively abandoned by their children. In a scene in which the old woman imagines meeting her own dead mother, she wonders: "Did Mom know? That I, too, needed her my entire life?"

From an early age, Ms. Shin was a voracious reader. (She was the fourth of six children.) By the time she was 15, she was certain she wanted to write for a living.

After their arrival in Seoul on that night train in 1978, her mother left her in the care of an older brother in a crammed room in a slum. While he worked in a government office by day and attended college at night, Ms. Shin worked in an audio and television parts factory and attended high school in the evenings.

In Seoul, she was one of the youngest employees in the factory. , where she witnessed the labor discontent that sometimes rocked South Korea as its economy galloped ahead but many workers toiled in sweatshop conditions.

"The girl sitting next to me at the night school had no fingerprints; she worked all day wrapping candies in a confectionery," Ms. Shin said in an interview. "Most of my classmates sent part of their meager wages back home to support their little brothers' and sisters' education. When they came to class, they were so tired most of them dozed."

Ms. Shin was the only one in her high school class to win admission to college. She eventually wrote about life at the factory in "A Lone Room," one of her most acclaimed novels.

"I wonder what would have become of me in those days if I hadn't had the goal of becoming a writer to hang on to," she said. "I was determined that one day I would write about what I saw and felt."

For several years after college, she supported her writing with odd jobs: writing scripts for a classical music radio station and reading books to blind people. But by 1993, she was successful enough to be able to write novels and short stories full time.

She also fulfilled a promise she had made to herself to repay her own mother's sacrifices. The day she and her mother went to Seoul, she remembers, her mother's face was etched with weariness.

"I promised myself then that one day I would write a beautiful book for Mom," she said.

That book, "Please Look After Mom," solidified her standing as one of South Korea's finest living novelists.

Her mother's reaction was typical of a generation accustomed to restraining their emotions.

As Ms. Shin recounted, "She only said, 'My dear, you have done well.'"

The New York Times