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Portrait of Han Kang

Literature · Novelists

Han Kang

born 1970 · South Korean

Contemporary Korean fiction

Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024, the first Korean writer and the first Asian woman to do so. Her short, intense novels move between bodily refusal and historical atrocity: a woman who stops eating meat and tries to become a tree, the massacre at Gwangju, the killings on Jeju Island. She had already become internationally known in 2016 when The Vegetarian won the Man Booker International Prize.

How to spot them

  • ▸Nobel laureate in literature for 2024; the first South Korean winner
  • ▸The Vegetarian and its translator Deborah Smith, who shared the 2016 Man Booker International Prize
  • ▸Gwangju, where she was born, and the 1980 uprising
  • ▸Bodies refusing, becoming plants, turning white; snow, blood and silence
  • ▸Her father, Han Seung-won, is also a novelist

Key works

The Vegetarian (2007)

Chaesikjuuija — Yeong-hye stops eating meat after a dream, and is narrated by her husband, her brother-in-law and her sister; it won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize

Human Acts (2014)

Sonyeon-i Onda — interlinked voices, including the dead, from the 1980 Gwangju uprising and its aftermath

The White Book (2016)

A meditation in fragments on white things and on the sister who died two hours after birth; shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2018

Greek Lessons (2011)

A woman who has lost her speech and a teacher of ancient Greek who is losing his sight

We Do Not Part (2021)

Jakbyeol-haji Anneunda — a journey through snow to a friend's house on Jeju Island, and the island's 1948 massacres; it won France's Prix Médicis étranger

Key ideas

  • Refusal enacted through the body: not eating, not speaking, not being human
  • Historical violence remembered through the individual body rather than through documentary narrative
  • White as the colour of mourning, swaddling and snow

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born on 27 November 1970 in Gwangju; the family moved to Seoul months before the 1980 uprising
  • •Her father, Han Seung-won, is a well-known novelist, and her brother writes too
  • •She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University and taught creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts
  • •The Vegetarian grew out of her earlier short story "The Fruit of My Woman"
  • •She and her translator Deborah Smith shared the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, the first year it was given for a single book
  • •She contributed a manuscript, Dear Son, My Beloved, to the Future Library in Norway in 2019, to be printed in 2114
  • •Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024 "for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life"
  • •She is the first South Korean and the first Asian woman to win the literature prize
  • •She declined to hold a celebratory press conference in 2024, citing the wars in Ukraine and Gaza

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources