South Korean author Han Kang wins 2024 Nobel Prize in literature

Han Kang (Korean: 한강; born November 27, 1970) is a South Korean writer.

She was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for "her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life", becoming the first Asian female Nobel Prize laureate in Literature and the second Korean Nobel Prize laureate.

She rose to international prominence with her novel The Vegetarian, which traces a woman's descent into mental illness and neglect from her family, which won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction in 2016.  The novel is also one of the first of her books to be translated into English.

Early life and education

Han Kang is the daughter of novelist Han Seung-won. She was born on 27 November 1970 in Gwangju and moved to Suyuri as a child, (of which she speaks affectionately in her novel Greek Lessons) in Seoul. Her brother Han Dong Rim is also a writer.

She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. In 1998 Hang was enrolled at the University of Iowa International Writing Program.

Career

Kang began her published career when five of her poems, including "Winter in Seoul," were featured in the Winter 1993 issue of the quarterly Literature and Society. She made her fiction debut in the following year when her short story "The Scarlet Anchor" was the winning entry in the Seoul Shinmun Spring Literary Contest. Since then, she has gone on to win the Yi Sang Literary Prize (2005), Today's Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award.

Kang has taught creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.

Kang's debut work, A Love of Yeosu, was published in 1995 and attracted attention for its precise and tightly narrated composition. Kang wrote The Vegetarian, and its sister-work, Mongolian Mark by hand, as overuse of the computer keyboard had damaged her wrist. It has been reported that in her college years Kang became obsessed with a line of poetry by the Korean modernist poet Yi Sang: "I believe that humans should be plants." She understood Yi's line to imply a defensive stance against the violence of Korea's colonial history under Japanese occupation, and took it as an inspiration to write her most successful work, The Vegetarian. The Vegetarian was Kang's first novel translated into English, although she had already attracted worldwide attention by the time Deborah Smith translated the novel into English. There has been some controversy over the translation of the novel, as scholars have detected mistakes in it; among other issues, there is concern that Smith may have attributed some of the dialogue to the wrong characters. The translated work won the Man Booker International Prize 2016 for them both. She is the first Korean to be nominated for the award. The work was also chosen as one of "The 10 Best Books of 2016" from The New York Times Book Review. Kang's third novel, The White Book, was shortlisted for the 2018 International Booker Prize.

Kang's literary career began when she published five poems including “Winter in Seoul", in the winter issue of Literature and Society in 1993. Her career in fiction began the following year when her story "Red Anchor" won the Seoul Shinmun Spring Literary Contest. Her first story collection, Love of Yeosu, was published in 1995. In 1998, Kang participated in a program at the University of Iowa International Writing Program. Her works published in Korea include Fruits of My Woman (2000) and Fire Salamander (2012); novels including The Black Deer (1998), Your Cold Hands (2002), The Vegetarian (2007), Breath Fighting (2010), Greek Lessons (2011), Human Acts (2014), The White Book (2016), and We Do Not Part (2021); poetry I Put the Evening in the Drawer (2013); essay books including Love, and the Things Around the Love (2003), Quietly Sung Songs (2007).

Kang is also a musician and interested in visual art, and her work often reflects this multi-disciplinary focus. "Your Cold Hand (2002)" revolves around the story of a sculptor and his model. When she published an essay book Quietly Sung Songs (2007), she released a CD with ten songs that she composed, wrote lyrics for and recorded. At first she was not intending to sing, but Han Jung Rim, a musician and music director, insisted Kang should record the songs herself.

Kang won the 25th Korean Novel Award with her novella Baby Buddha in 1999, the 2000 Today's Young Artist Award, the 2005 Yi Sang Literary Award with Mongolian Mark, and the 2010 Dong-in Literary Award with Breath Fighting. Baby Buddha and The Vegetarian have been made into films. The Vegetarian was turned into a movie that was one of only 14 selections (out of 1,022 submissions) for inclusion in the World Narrative Competition of the prestigious North American Film Fest. The film was also a critical success at the Busan International Film Festival.

Mongolian Mark won the Yi Sang Literary Award. The rest of the series (The Vegetarian and Fire Tree) were delayed by contractual problems. Kang was the youngest to receive the Yi Sang Literary Award in 2005 until 2013 when Kim Aeran received it at the age of 32. Kang's Human Acts was released in January 2016 from Portobello Books. Kang received the Premio Malaparte in 2017 for the Italian translation of Human Acts, "Atti Umani" from Adelphi Edizioni, 2017 in Italy on 1 October 2017.

Han Kang's 2017 autobiographical novel The White Book centers on the loss of her older sister, a baby who died two hours after her birth. In 2018 Kang became the fifth writer chosen to contribute to the Future Library project.

In 2023, her fourth full-length novel was translated into English, Greek Lessons. The Atlantic called it a book in which "words are both insufficient and too powerful to tame."

She was elected as a Royal Society of Literature International Writer in 2023.

She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2024 by the Swedish Academy.

Han Kang on Violence, Beauty, and the (Im)possibility of Innocence

Bethanne Patrick in conversation with the author of The Vegetarian

By Bethanne Patrick

February 12, 2016

People often ask me how I choose what I read, a question that is posed to most of my fellow book critics, too. It’s easy when an editor assigns a specific title, or when I already know and love a specific author’s work. Of course I’m going to look out for the new Louise Erdrich or Justin Torres or Reif Larsen.

However, it’s less easy to choose debut authors, or, in the case of Han Kang, authors who are debuting in the US market. Although Ms. Han published The Vegetarian in her native Korea in 2007, her startling and sad novel didn’t reach our shores until this week—in large part due to the efforts of her English translator, Deborah Smith. Luckily for us, we’re now able to enjoy this remarkably paced story of how trauma reverberates through a family, a story very much of its place and culture but with messages for any human being, anywhere.

Due to the time difference and the Lunar New Year holiday, Han and I conducted this interview via email. Below, her thoughtful responses about why The Vegetarian is “not an indictment of the Korean patriarchy,” how Korea’s literary scene differs from our own, and how she sees the world as “mingled violence and beauty.”

Bethanne Patrick: What is it like to have so much success with a novel you initially published over a decade ago?

Han Kang: Whenever I finish a novel, somehow I feel I am expelled from it. However, partly because this novel has been published one by one in different languages for nine years, I still feel close to this book, mostly because this novel is intertwined with my recent one, Human Acts. Although these two works look very different, I feel that they are a pair.

BP: How did the idea for The Vegetarian originally come to you? Was it an image? The character of Yeong-hye? Something else?

Han Kang: The image of a woman turning into a plant. I wrote a short story, “The Fruit of My Woman,” in 1997, where a woman literally turns into a plant. After several years I reworked this image in The Vegetarian, in a darker and fiercer way.

BP: The events and themes in your novel are extremely potent: Physical and sexual abuse, abandonment, self-harm, eroticism, much more. Have any reader or critic reactions surprised you? Have they, for instance, fixed on one aspect of the story and missed another?

Han Kang: I think this novel has some layers: questioning human violence and the (im)possibility of innocence; defining sanity and madness; the (im)possibility of understanding others, body as the last refuge or the last determination, and some more. It will be inevitable that different aspects are more focused on by different readers and cultural backgrounds. If I could say one thing, this novel isn’t a singular indictment of the Korean patriarchy. I wanted to deal with my long-lasting questions about the possibility/impossibility of innocence in this world, which is mingled with such violence and beauty. These were universal questions that occupied me as I wrote it.

BP: We in the United States tend to miss a lot of literature from the rest of the world. We certainly don’t know much about the Korean literary scene and tradition. How are you part of those, and also not?

Han Kang: The Korean literary scene is different from western ones in some aspects. For example, it has a strong tradition of poetry and short stories. Most fiction writers start their careers as short story writers. I myself started with short stories (and poetry). I feel I have a great debt to literature written in Korean because I literally grew up with it. Also, I could read the literary works translated into Korean from a lot of languages, without any distinction such as which is foreign or not. I still do that. I just read.

BP: Speaking of Korean literature, as long as we make sure to read your book first, which other authors should we know about? Types of books?

Han Kang: Poetry and short stories are very strong here. There are also good novel writers. Lim Chulwoo is my favorite; I like Hwang Jeong-eun as well.

BP: What was the translation process like for you, with your translator Deborah Smith?

Han Kang: Deborah usually sends me the file of her translation after she finishes, with notes and questions. And I send it back to her with my answers and notes. It is just like having a chat endlessly. I truly enjoy this process. I am lucky to have met Deborah, a wonderful translator who can render subtlety and delicacy.

BP: Which authors inspire your work, and why?

Han Kang: It isn’t easy for me to namecheck favorite writers because they always change. I feel inspired by visual art as well, perhaps even more. However, it is also difficult for me to name particular artists. (Yet I put one of the self portraits of Käthe Kolwitz on the wall of my room wherever I move.)

BP: In The Vegetarian, your main character Yeong-hye’s process of self-denial springs from deep, brutal experiences, and it causes deep, brutal events in her family. In the West, we see elements of Greek tragedy in such a plot. Does that concept influence your writing? If yes, how? If no, please explain.

Han Kang: For Yeong-hye, I just followed the imagery, which came to me when I was 26, of a woman who turns into a plant. I think the book’s second part more or less has the structure of a traditional tragedy. I wanted to deal with the process by which a human being crumbles and crashes due to the fissure which arises within himself. I thought that internal process needed to be described with a maximum amount of detail. The part I like the most in this section is the scene in which “he” keeps on talking to himself about death while driving to meet Yeong-hye. For me, that suffering was the core of this character.

BP: One critic called this “a trilogy of stories.” Here it is considered a novel. Does the distinction matter to you?

Han Kang: I think this is a novel. Trilogy or triptych, which consists of three independent novellas.

BP: While there are certainly cultural differences between your characters in Korea and women in other parts of the world, one thing that doesn’t change is how women’s bodies are sexualized, pulled apart by men even through a simple glance. It’s shocking to have one character obsessed with his wife’s braless nipples while other family members tear into meat. Where do Korean women feel they stand in terms of feminism’s progress?

Han Kang: South Korea has undergone many changes very quickly, so a lot of things have become kind of hybrid here. As for feminism’s progress, statistics show that many Korean women are well educated and perform impressively in their careers. There was a boom of feminism in the 1990s here, and some people say this term sounds a bit out of fashion to the public now. However, women are still striving, with issues either apparent or hidden. There is one peculiar thing about the Korean literary scene. Female writers have slightly outnumbered male writers since the 1990s, and nowadays neither readers nor critics make the distinction about whether a certain writer is male or female. It seems a curious phenomenon because Korean society itself is quite conservative.

BP: We’ve spoken about women; now a moment for the men, who are extremely important to the story. The voices of Mr. Cheong, the father, Ji-woo’s father, and J. are all quite distinct. Could you talk about what it was like writing these characters?

Han Kang: As I said before, this novel deals with human violence and the (im)possibility of refusing it. Yeong-hye desperately refuses meat to reject human brutality from herself. Furthermore, she doesn’t want to belong to the human race any longer, and believes that she is being transformed into a plant. Her father, a veteran from the Vietnamese war, tries to force her to eat meat. This violent scene appears in three sections repeatedly. It recurs in the third section when the doctors try to feed Yeong-hye in the psychiatric hospital. At the risk of oversimplifying, I could say these characters are sharing (and personifying) the similar violence to the determination of Yeong-hye.

BP: Although the bulk of the caregiving In-hye does for Yeong-hye comes at the end of the book, there really is no start or finish to it. The Vegetarian is almost an inversion tale; usually we first see the damaged, challenged person but don’t know their backstory. Your comment(s)?

Han Kang: In the last part, I didn’t want to describe the death of Yeong-hye. I wanted to end this book with the final scene, where In-hye looks out the ambulance window with a protesting gaze. I felt that this was a scene of gazing with all one’s energy at this world of mingled violence and beauty. Without start or finish, only struggling tenaciously with her open eyes, in the same form/way of “now” in our life.

BP: Recently a German scientist wrote an important book (it has not been translated into English, yet) about the lives of trees, their social networks/bonds, and how animate they truly are. You clearly understand a great deal about trees and plants. How did you learn this/research this aspect of the book?

Han Kang: I would like to read that! I had read some books about the lives of plants and enjoyed them. However, I didn’t research this aspect for this book. Instead, I met up with a video artist and learned how he makes his work (which has a completely different content than the video art in my book) to write the second part of The Vegetarian. For the third part, thankfully I was able to visit a psychiatric hospital through a doctor’s introduction. All of those details were a great help.

BP: From the US cover, we can tell that your novel has something to do with roots and rootedness. Tell us about your thoughts on this, and about the Korean experience in feeling rooted to the land.

Han Kang: Yeong-hye is such a determined person that she believes herself to no longer belong to the human race. She feels and wants to get literally uprooted from human beings. In this way she believes she is saving herself, but ironically she is actually approaching death. Of course, in the real world she is mad, but to her it is something thoroughly sane. She is trying to root herself into this extreme and bizarre sanity by uprooting herself from the surface of this world.

BP: What are you working on next? Will people who read this novel see another book from you soon?

Han Kang: My recent novel, Human Acts, will come out in the US next year. A little while ago I wrote a very short book that’s difficult to classify, a kind of essay-cum-prose poem. It is scheduled to be published this June in South Korea. For my next full novel, I’m writing another three-part work. I have already completed the first novella and am writing the second one now. As I don’t want to rush with this work, I am going write it as slowly as possible.