The South Korea author of I Want To Die But I Want To Eat Tteokbokki has died aged 35.
Baek Se-hee, who wrote the international bestseller in 2018, donated her heart, lungs, liver and kidneys to help save five lives, the Korean Organ Donation Agency said.
The circumstances surrounding her death remain unclear.
The book, which featured a compilation of her conversations with a psychiatrist as she struggled with depression, grew to global prominence.
First published in 2018, it sold more than a million copies worldwide.
The work was translated into 25 languages and into English in 2022.
The bestseller was praised for normalising mental health conversations and the nuance of balancing personal struggles with every day joys.
‘The human heart, even when it wants to die, quite often wants at the same time to eat some tteokbokki, too,’ the book’s most famous line said.
In a statement her sister said she ‘wanted to write, to share her heart with others through her work, and to inspire hope.
‘Knowing her gentle nature, incapable of harboring hatred, I hope she can now rest peacefully.’
Anton Hur, who had translated Baek’s book into English, said her organs have saved five people but ‘her readers will know she touched yet millions of lives more with her writing’.
‘My thoughts are with her family,’ he wrote on Instagram.
Baek Se-hee was born in 1990 and studied creative writing at university before working at a publishing house for five years.
She received treatment for dysthymia, a mild but long-lasting form of depression, for ten years.
That treatment became the subject of her essays, her publisher Bloomsbury said.
She published a sequel, I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki, in Korean in 2019.
