Born in 1963 as the second of five children, Hwang was unable to attend middle school due to poverty, but thanks to a teacher who gave her a key to a classroom, she could go to the school and read books whenever she wanted. She enrolled in high school by taking a certificate examination and she graduated from the creative writing departments at Seoul Institute of the Arts and Gwangju University, and from graduate school at Chung-Ang University. She lives in Seoul, South Korea.[4][5]
Hwang is an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Literature in the Seoul Institute of the Arts. Hwang's career as a writer began in 1995, and since then she has published nearly 30 books over various genres.[3] She is most famous for her work The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly which was also made into a movie that broke Korean box office records for animated films, earning nearly 7 billion won in its first month of release.[6]