Han Kang

In 2024 Han Kang became the first South Korean author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Known for her experimental fiction and her works that address humanity’s capacity for violence, Han was cited by the Nobel committee “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

Childhood and influences

Han and her family moved to Seoul when she was nine years old, leaving Gwangju, South Korea, just four months before the Gwangju Uprising, a mass protest against the South Korean military government that took place in May 1980. The government’s brutal response has frequently haunted Han’s writing, and she has said that her family’s incidental move before the uprising has left her with a sense of “survivor’s guilt.”

Han’s father was a teacher and, later, a novelist (although not a financially successful one), and Han grew up in a home filled with books. In 2023 she told The Guardian, “To me, books were half-living beings that constantly multiplied and expanded their boundaries. Despite [our] frequent moves, I could feel at ease thanks to all those books protecting me. Before I made friends in a strange neighborhood, I had my books with me every afternoon.”

Han’s favorite authors as a child included the Korean writers Kang So-cheon and Ma Hae-song. She also enjoyed The Brothers Lionheart (1973) by Swedish children’s author Astrid Lindgren. By her teens, she was hooked on Russian authors such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Boris Pasternak and became “enthralled” with Lim Chul-woo’s short story “Sapyong Station” (2002).

Education

Han studied Korean language and literature at Yonsei University in Seoul, graduating in 1993. That same year she published her first poems in a Korean literary magazine and won a prize the following year in the newspaper Seoul Shinmun’s annual literary contest. In 1995 she published Yeosu, a book of short stories. She participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 1998. Her first novel, the mystery Geomeun saseum (“Black Deer”), was published later that year.

Novels

The political events in Gwangju during Han’s childhood and her beginnings as a poet inform her fiction writing. Her prose is often described as experimental and imbued with metaphors, and her work addresses such themes as violence, grief, and patriarchy. In an interview with The White Review in 2016 she explained, “The broad spectrum of humanity, which runs from the sublime to the brutal, has for me been like a difficult homework problem ever since I was a child. You could say that my books are variations on this theme of human violence.”

Chaesikjuuija (2007; Eng. trans. The Vegetarian, 2015) was the first of her novels to be translated into English, and it won the International Booker Prize in 2016. It originated in 1997 as the short story “Nae yeojaui yeolmae” (“The Fruit of My Woman”). Examining issues such as body horror, mental illness, consent, and misogyny, the novel tells the story of a young woman who stops eating meat, which has disturbing consequences. After her family attempts to force-feed her, she stops eating altogether. Some critics interpreted the protagonist’s rebellion and her family’s response as a metaphor for colonial rebellion and the violence of imperialism. In 2009 the novel was adapted into a film, directed by Lim Woo-seong.

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In 2011 Han published Huirabeo sigan (Eng. trans. Greek Lessons, 2023), an exploration of grief and its impact on language. The novel features two unnamed narrators, a man who is losing his ability to see and a woman who is losing her ability to speak. In a review published in The New York Times, Idra Novey noted its “occasional excesses” of repetition in the prose but added, “This novel achieves the distinctive sharpness of observation and persuasive narrative power that brought such recognition to [Han’s] more assured, fully realized books.”

In Huin (2016; Eng. trans. The White Book, 2017), Han uses a fragmented first-person narrative to eulogize an unnamed woman’s sister who died less than two hours after being born. Praised for its haunting power, the novel was a finalist for the 2018 International Booker Prize.

Han’s other notable novels include Geudaeui chagaun son (2002; “Your Cold Hands”) and Sonyeoni onda (2014; Eng. trans. Human Acts, 2016), in which she calls upon her memories of the Gwangju Uprising. Human Acts won the Manhae Prize for Literature. Jakbyeolhaji anneunda (2021; to be published in English in 2025 as We Do Not Part) is a work of historical fiction that centers on the impact of a massacre committed by the South Korean government during a rebellion on Jeju Island in the 1940s.

Other projects

In 2018 Han was selected to contribute to Future Library, a project that began in 2014 and invites one author each year to produce a manuscript to be stored until 2114, when all the manuscripts will be published as an anthology printed on paper grown from trees planted in 2014.