Michael Finch (1957-) was born in Wendover, England. As a child he lived in Edinburgh, Sheffield and the Wirral, finally returning to his parents' hometown of Liverpool in the early 1970s. After five years at Shrewsbury School, he went on to study English Literature at Cambridge University, graduating in 1979. After a long absence from the academic world, in 1987 he began work as a lecturer at universities in the Republic of Korea, while studying the Korean language at Seoul National University and attaining an MA degree in Korean studies from Yonsei University with a thesis on the contemporary Korean novelist Yi Munyeol. In 1994 he returned to the UK to do his DPhil in Korean history at the University of Oxford, where he wrote his dissertation on the late Choson statesman, Min Yonghwan. It was this dissertation that was eventually published by Hawai'i University Press as Min Yonghwan: A Political Biography. In 2008 a companion volume to this work entitled, Min Yonghwan: The Selected Writings of a Late Choson Diplomat, was published by the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Michael Finch was a visiting professor of Korean studies at Humboldt University of Berlin and is currently an associate professor of Korean studies at Keimyung University in Taegu, Korea and the editor of the international Korean studies journal Acta Koreana. He is married with four children and in the university vacations lives at his home in Oxford, UK.