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Donghoon Shin

About this Artist

Born in South Korea in 1983, Donghoon Shin studied composition at Seoul National University with Sukhi Kang and Uzong Choe. He moved to London in 2014, studying with Julian Anderson at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He currently combines his composing career with studies for a PhD in Composition supervised by Sir George Benjamin at King’s College London.  

In 2010 Shin won the Gran Prix of the ANM-BBVA International Composition Concours, followed by the Goethe Award in 2013 from the Goethe-Institut and Tongyeong International Music Festival. Major awards over the past decade include the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize in 2016, a UK Critics’ Circle Music Award for Young Talent in 2019, and the Claudio Abbado Prize in 2022. In the 2017/18 season he served as Young Composer in Residence with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group through Sound and Music’s Embedded Scheme and in 2019 was selected as a composer laureate for three years by Ricordilab.  

Shin’s music has been performed and commissioned by prominent orchestras, ensembles, and festivals such as the London Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic, Karajan Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic, Dresden Philharmonic, Spanish National Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Ensemble Recherche, Riot Ensemble, EXAUDI vocal ensemble, Festival d’Automne à Paris, and Tongyeong International Music Festival.  

Recent works include Of Rats and Men (2019) for chamber orchestra, premiered by the Karajan Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Peter Eötvös, with further performances in Grafenegg, Austria;  Budapest; and Seoul. Kafka’s Dream (2018/19), inspired by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges’ essay about Franz Kafka, was first performed by the London Symphony Orchestra under François-Xavier Roth, has traveled to Dresden, and was toured internationally by the Seoul Philharmonic in 2022. Shin’s cello concerto Nachtergebung (Night Surrender), for Bruno Delepelaire and the Karajan Academy conducted by Kirill Petrenko, was premiered in May 2022 in Berlin. His double concerto, Double Act, for sheng, accordion, and orchestra, was given its first performance in Bochum, Germany, in November 2022 with soloists Wu Wei and Pascal Contet.  

Donghoon Shin’s music is published by Boosey & Hawkes. —Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes