Korea Television and Radio Writers Association

Korea Television and Radio Writers Association (KTRWA, 한국방송작가협회) is the main professional body representing Korean broadcast writers across drama, radio, documentary, entertainment, translation, and OTT-era screen work. The association says its roots go back to 1957, with formal establishment in April 1988, and its current English-language materials put membership at nearly 4,800 writers.

That scale matters because KTRWA is not just a networking club. It sits inside the industry's rights and labor infrastructure, from education through copyright administration to collective pressure around how Korean writers are paid when their work keeps generating value for large distributors and streamers. Its public materials now foreground the fair-remuneration fight, which says a lot about where the pressure points have moved.

In 2026 the association became especially visible when it pushed back on the Motion Picture Association's framing of the Korean screen economy and argued that writers still face buyout structures even as platforms such as Netflix and Viki keep extending the afterlife of Korean content overseas. It also highlighted new overseas representation agreements in 2025, a sign that KTRWA is thinking about writer compensation as a cross-border issue rather than only a domestic broadcast dispute.