Hong Jin-pyo was born in Gwangju City, South Korea in 1963. Since enrolling at Seoul National University in 1982, he has been engaged in the pro-democracy movement for more than 10 years and has been imprisoned three times by authoritarian regimes. Since the late 1990s, he has contributed to the publication of the social theory magazine <The Zeitgeist> and the North Korean human rights movement. He has been a standing commissioner of the National Human Rights Commission for three years since 2011. His book is <Intellect and anti-intellectualism>(2005)