A 15-year-old middle school student has published a historical novel in English titled "Rebellion" about the friendship between a Roman aristocrat and a gladiator. Lee So-young wrote the novel over two or three hours a day from January 2008. "I lived in France for a year and in the U.S. for three years and two months as my father worked for the World Health Organization, so it was natural for me to write in English," she says.
"I used to write one or two pages of a novel and when I found a book interesting, I wrote the sequel myself. One day, I named my parrot Caesar, as it sounded nice. Then I searched for Caesar and became interested in Roman history, which is why I started to write this novel," Lee says. She did extensive research for the novel by looking up anything she didn't know in encyclopedias and boldly cut dozens pages for the sake of story flow. Sometimes, she spent all day thinking about how to improve passages.
The novel was completed in December last year and came out on Monday. "I put all I have into this book, so it might take a couple of years for me to write another," she says.
