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What Else Do We Know About Han Kang – the 2024 Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature?
By Janpha Thadphoothon
In October 2024, Han Kang, the acclaimed South Korean novelist, made history by becoming the first Asian female author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy recognized her for her "intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life," bestowing upon her the prestigious award, valued at 11 million Swedish crowns. This extraordinary achievement has garnered international attention for her profound body of work, particularly her exploration of complex emotional and psychological landscapes. Throughout her novels, novellas, essays, and short story collections, Han has tackled themes such as patriarchy, violence, grief, and the essence of humanity.
A Literary Voice That Resonates Beyond Borders
Han Kang’s works have garnered international recognition long before her Nobel win. Her 2007 novel The Vegetarian became a global sensation after it won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. The novel delves into the life of a woman who rejects societal norms and embraces vegetarianism, a seemingly simple choice that leads to deep psychological and physical turmoil. Through this work, Han Kang masterfully navigates themes of repression, autonomy, and the human body’s relationship with nature. The novel’s delicate yet brutal prose captivated readers worldwide, establishing Han Kang as one of the most intriguing voices in contemporary literature.
Below is an excerpt from the novel that earned her the Man Booker Prize:
"Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way. To be frank, the first time I met her I wasn’t even attracted to her. Middling height; bobbed hair neither long nor short; jaundiced, sickly-looking skin; somewhat prominent cheekbones; her timid, sallow aspect told me all I needed to know. As she came up to the table where I was waiting, I couldn’t help but notice her shoes—the plainest black shoes imaginable. And that walk of hers—neither fast nor slow, striding nor mincing."
Source: https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2014-04/the-vegetarian/
Her ability to translate deeply Korean experiences and traumas into universal human themes is a hallmark of her writing. The Vegetarian, along with Human Acts, which recounts the tragic Gwangju Uprising of 1980, reflects her focus on historical trauma and personal suffering. By confronting South Korea’s painful history and its implications for individual lives, Han Kang invites readers to reflect on the fragility and resilience of the human spirit.
Collaboration and Translation
One might wonder about the language in which Han Kang originally writes. As a Korean author, she writes all her works in her native language, Korean. However, her novels have gained international acclaim through high-quality translations, particularly into English. One of the most notable examples is The Vegetarian, which was translated by Deborah Smith and won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize.
Han’s collaboration with translators, especially Deborah Smith, has been instrumental in sharing her unique literary voice with a global audience. These translations faithfully convey the nuances of her poetic prose and the emotional depth of her work. While translation has played a key role in her global success, the original language of her novels remains Korean.
Early Life and Influences
Born in 1970 in Gwangju, South Korea, Han Kang’s upbringing was shaped by a literary environment. Her father, Han Seung-won, is a well-known novelist, and she spent much of her childhood surrounded by books. This early exposure to literature laid the foundation for her career. After studying Korean literature at Yonsei University, she began publishing poetry and short stories, which quickly caught the attention of literary critics.
Gwangju, the city of her birth, had a profound influence on her work. The Gwangju Uprising, a pivotal moment in Korean history when citizens revolted against military dictatorship, left an indelible mark on her. The massacre of civilians that followed would later serve as the inspiration for Human Acts (2014), a novel that grapples with collective trauma and the individual’s experience of political violence.
A Distinct Writing Style
Han Kang’s writing is characterized by its minimalist yet lyrical quality. Her prose is often stark, allowing the reader to fill the emotional gaps between the lines. This quiet intensity is part of what makes her work so moving. She captures complex emotions and thoughts in simple, poetic language, focusing on silences and what is left unsaid as much as on what is expressed.
Another hallmark of her work is her exploration of the human body, not just as a vessel of experience but as a battleground for societal and personal conflict. In The Vegetarian, the protagonist’s rejection of meat symbolizes a rejection of violence and the subjugation of her own body. This theme extends into Human Acts, where the bodies of victims of political violence serve as a haunting reminder of mortality and resistance.
Below is an excerpt from Han Kang's novel The Vegetarian, illustrating her nuanced portrayal of the human body and the complex dynamics within personal relationships:
"The only respect in which my wife was at all unusual was that she didn’t like wearing a bra. When I was a young man barely out of adolescence, and my wife and I were dating, I happened to put my hand on her back only to find that I couldn’t feel a bra strap under her sweater, and when I realized what this meant I became quite aroused. In order to judge whether she might possibly have been trying to tell me something, I spent a minute or two looking at her through new eyes, studying her attitude. The outcome of my studies was that she wasn’t, in fact, trying to send any kind of signal. So if not, was it laziness, or just a sheer lack of concern? I couldn’t get my head round it. It wasn’t even as though she had shapely breasts which might suit the “no-bra look.” I would have preferred her to go around wearing one that was thickly padded, so that I could save face in front of my acquaintances."
The husband’s fixation on his wife's choice not to wear a bra exposes a deep discomfort with her autonomy. He attempts to rationalize her decision, questioning whether it's laziness or indifference. His focus on appearances, particularly the "no-bra look" and his concern for "saving face" in front of others, demonstrates how women’s bodies are often subjected to external scrutiny and control. The husband's view of his wife’s body is shaped by cultural expectations of femininity, suggesting that even in intimate relationships, the female body is often objectified.
"On the dining table my wife had laid out lettuce and soybean paste, plain seaweed soup without the usual beef or clams, and kimchi.
“What the hell? So all because of some ridiculous dream, you’ve gone and chucked out all the meat? Worth how much?”
I got up from my chair and opened the freezer. It was practically empty—nothing but miso powder, chili powder, frozen fresh chilies, and a pack of minced garlic.
“Just make me some fried eggs. I’m really tired today. I didn’t even get to have a proper lunch.”
“I threw the eggs out as well.”
“What?”
“And I’ve given up milk too.”
“This is unbelievable. You’re telling me not to eat meat?”
“I couldn’t let those things stay in the fridge. It wouldn’t be right.”
How on earth could she be so self-centered? I stared at her lowered eyes, her expression of cool self-possession. The very idea that there should be this other side to her, one where she selfishly did as she pleased, was astonishing. Who would have thought she could be so unreasonable?
“So you’re saying that from now on, there’ll be no meat in this house?”
“Well, after all, you usually only eat breakfast at home. And I suppose you often have meat with your lunch and dinner, so . . . it’s not as if you’ll die if you go without meat just for one meal.”."
Source: https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2014-04/the-vegetarian/
The wife's rejection of meat—and by extension, her rejection of her husband's desires—symbolizes a deeper transformation of her identity. Her decision to discard animal products, influenced by a dream, introduces a conflict between the self and societal norms. The husband's reaction—his disbelief and frustration—mirrors a common theme in Han Kang's work: the struggle between personal freedom and social conformity. The wife's actions challenge the conventional dynamics of their marriage, disrupting the husband's sense of control and predictability.
This excerpt also touches on cultural and gender expectations within marriage. The husband's outrage over his wife’s dietary changes reveals his expectation that she will maintain the household according to his preferences. Her quiet assertion of her own beliefs, even if through the symbolic act of removing meat from the fridge, becomes an act of rebellion. The husband's response underscores his inability to grasp that her choices are not about him. This speaks to the broader issue of women’s agency in patriarchal societies, where their bodies and decisions are often seen as belonging to others rather than to themselves.
Han Kang masterfully illustrates the subtle power dynamics within the relationship. The wife’s quiet defiance—her decision not to argue, but simply to act—contrasts with the husband's need for justification and control. Her silence and self-possession unsettle him. He views her actions as irrational and self-centered, failing to see them as expressions of her inner struggle for autonomy. The tension between them exposes the fragility of their relationship and hints at the broader fragility of societal structures built on rigid expectations of gender roles.
While The Vegetarian and Human Acts are her best-known works, Han Kang’s bibliography is extensive. Her lesser-known works, such as Greek Lessons (2011) and The White Book (2016), explore themes of language, loss, and identity. The White Book is particularly unique in its meditative structure, blending memoir, poetry, and fiction to examine the color white as a symbol of death, purity, and emptiness. This introspective work pushes the boundaries of the novel form, showcasing Han Kang’s willingness to experiment with literary conventions.
Below is an excerpt from Kang's 20116 novel - the Greek Lessons:
The woman brings her hands together in front of her chest. Frowns, and looks up at the blackboard.
“Okay, read it out,” the man with the thick-lensed, silver-rimmed spectacles says with a smile.
The woman’s lips twitch. She moistens her lower lip with the tip of her tongue. In front of her chest, her hands are quietly restless. She opens her mouth, and closes it again. She holds her breath, then inhales deeply. The man steps back toward the blackboard and patiently asks her again to read.
The woman’s eyelids tremble. Like insects’ wings rubbing briskly together. The woman closes her eyes, reopens them. As if she hopes in the moment of opening her eyes to find herself transported to some other location.
The man readjusts his glasses, his fingers thickly floured with white chalk.
“Come on now, out loud.”
The woman wears a high-necked black sweater and black trousers. The jacket she’s hung on her chair is black, and the scarf she’s put in her big, black cloth bag is knitted from black wool. Above that somber uniform, which makes it seem as if she’s just come from a funeral, her face is thin and drawn, like the elongated features of certain clay sculptures.
She is a woman neither young nor particularly beautiful. Her eyes have an intelligent look, but the constant spasming of her eyelids makes this hard to perceive. Her back and shoulders are permanently drawn in, as though she is seeking refuge inside her black clothes, and her fingernails are clipped back severely. Around her left wrist is a dark purple velvet hairband, the solitary point of color on an otherwise monochrome figure.
“Let’s all read it together.” The man cannot wait for the woman any longer. He moves his gaze over the baby-faced university student who sits in the same row as the woman, the middle-aged man half hidden behind a pillar and the well-set-up young man sitting by the window, slouching in his chair.
“Emos, hemeteros. ‘My,’ ‘our.’ ” The three students read, their voices low and shy. “Sos, humeteros. ‘Your’ singular, ‘your’ plural.”
The man standing by the blackboard looks to be in his mid to late thirties. He is slight, with eyebrows like bold accents over his eyes and a deep groove at the base of his nose. A faint smile of restrained emotion plays around his mouth. His dark brown corduroy jacket has fawn-colored leather elbow patches. The sleeves are a bit short, exposing his wrists. The woman gazes up at the scar that runs in a slender pale curve from the edge of his left eyelid to the edge of his mouth. When she’d seen it in their first lesson, she’d thought of it as marking where tears had once flowed.
As an English language teacher, I can picture the scene quite clearly. Countless times, I have observed my students struggling to articulate English words and sentences. However, I never delved beyond the issues of motivation. I naively believed that every person possesses an inherent language-learning ability and that with practice, everyone can excel in a foreign language.
A Voice for the Vulnerable
Han Kang’s Nobel win highlights her role as a writer who gives voice to the marginalized and the vulnerable. Her works often depict characters who resist societal norms, whether through acts of defiance or through their silence. This focus on the individual’s struggle against larger forces, whether political, social, or personal, is what makes her work so resonant in today’s world.
There is substantial evidence to support the assertion that Han Kang’s Nobel win highlights her role as a writer who gives voice to the marginalized and the vulnerable. Here are some key points and examples from her works that illustrate this theme. In The Vegetarian, the protagonist Yeong-hye’s decision to stop eating meat becomes a radical act of defiance against societal expectations and norms. This choice alienates her from her family and society, reflecting the struggles of those who challenge conformity. Yeong-hye’s journey reveals the internal and external conflicts faced by individuals who resist societal pressures. In Human Acts, Han explores the aftermath of the Gwangju Uprising in 1980, focusing on the experiences of ordinary people caught in the chaos. The novel gives voice to victims of political violence and oppression, portraying their suffering and resilience.
Many of Han's characters grapple with issues of silence and repression. For instance, in The Vegetarian, Yeong-hye’s refusal to conform and her eventual descent into silence can be seen as a commentary on how societal expectations can suppress individual voices. The exploration of trauma and the human condition in her works often reflects the voices of those who are otherwise overlooked or ignored in society, such as victims of war, political dissenters, and women facing patriarchal constraints.
Han’s narratives often critique social structures and cultural norms that marginalize individuals. Her writing challenges readers to confront uncomfortable truths about society, encouraging empathy for those who suffer under oppressive systems.
As of October 2024, two Koreans have been awarded Nobel Prizes: South Korean President Kim Dae-jung and writer Han Kang. As the second Korean Nobel laureate, following Kim Dae-jung, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000, Han Kang’s achievement represents a proud moment for South Korea. However, her appeal extends beyond her home country; her works resonate with universal themes of suffering, healing, and the fragility of human life.
The Legacy of Han Kang
With the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, Han Kang joins the ranks of the most influential literary figures of our time. Her win represents not just recognition of her body of work, but also the growing global appreciation for voices from East Asia. As readers around the world discover or revisit her novels, her ability to confront historical trauma and human suffering through poetic prose will continue to resonate deeply.
Han Kang’s literary journey is a reminder that art can be both a mirror to society’s darkest moments and a means of healing. Her ability to convey the unspoken and delve into the deepest recesses of the human experience ensures that her voice will echo through the literary world for generations to come.
References:
Korean author Han Kang wins Nobel literature prize - Novelist praised for works that explore ‘the fragility of human life’ https://www.bangkokpost.com/life/arts-and-entertainment/2881506/korean-author-han-kang-wins-nobel-literature-prize
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2024: Han Kang
https://www.svenskaakademien.se/en
The Vegetarian
https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2014-04/the-vegetarian/
Appendix:
Biobibliography
Han Kang’s major international breakthrough came with the novel 채식주의자 (2007; The Vegetarian, 2015). Written in three parts, the book portrays the violent consequences that ensue when its protagonist Yeong-hye refuses to submit to the norms of food intake. Her decision not to eat meat is met with various, entirely different reactions. Her behavior is forcibly rejected by both her husband and her authoritarian father, and she is exploited erotically and aesthetically by her brother-in-law, a video artist who becomes obsessed with her passive body. Ultimately, she is committed to a psychiatric clinic, where her sister attempts to rescue her and bring her back to a ‘normal’ life. However, Yeong-hye sinks ever deeper into a psychosis-like condition expressed through the ‘flaming trees’, a symbol for a plant kingdom that is as enticing as it is dangerous.
A more plot-based book is 바람이 분다, 가라 (“The Wind Blows, Go”) from 2010, a large and complex novel about friendship and artistry, in which grief and a longing for transformation are strongly present. Han Kang’s physical empathy for extreme life stories is reinforced by her increasingly charged metaphorical style. 희랍어 시간 (Greek Lessons, 2023) from 2011 is a captivating portrayal of an extraordinary relationship between two vulnerable individuals. A young woman who, following a string of traumatic experiences, has lost the power of speech connects with her teacher in Ancient Greek, who is himself losing his sight. From their respective flaws, a brittle love affair develops. The book is a beautiful meditation around loss, intimacy and the ultimate conditions of language.
In the novel 소년이 온다 (2014; Human Acts, 2016), Han Kang this time employs as her political foundation a historical event that took place in the city of Gwangju, where she herself grew up and where hundreds of students and unarmed civilians were murdered during a massacre carried out by the South Korean military in 1980. In seeking to give voice to the victims of history, the book confronts this episode with brutal actualization and, in so doing, approaches the genre of witness literature. Han Kang’s style, as visionary as it is succinct, nevertheless deviates from our expectations of that genre, and it is a particular expedient of hers to permit the souls of the dead to be separated from their bodies, thus allowing them to witness their own annihilation. In certain moments, at the sight of the unidentifiable corpses that cannot be buried, the text harks back to the basic motif of Sophocles’s Antigone. In 흰 (2016; The White Book, 2017), Han Kang’s poetic style once again dominates. The book is an elegy dedicated to the person who could have been the narrative self’s elder sister, but who passed away only a couple of hours after birth. In a sequence of short notes, all concerning white objects, it is through this colour of grief that the work as a whole is associatively constructed. This renders it less a novel and more a kind of ‘secular prayer book’, as it has also been described. If, the narrator reasons, the imaginary sister had been allowed to live, she herself would not have been permitted to come into being. It is also in addressing the dead that the book reaches its final words: ‘Within that white, all of those white things, I will breathe in the final breath you released.’
Another highlight is the late work, 작별하지 않는다 (“We Do Not Part”) from 2021, which in terms of its imagery of pain is closely connected to The White Book. The story unfolds in the shadow of a massacre that took place in the late 1940s on South Korea’s Jeju Island, where tens of thousands of people, among them children and the elderly, were shot on suspicion of being collaborators. The book portrays the shared mourning process undertaken by the narrator and her friend Inseon, who both, long after the event, bear with them the trauma associated with the disaster that has befallen their relatives. With imagery that is as precise as it is condensed, Han Kang not only conveys the power of the past over the present, but also, equally powerfully, traces the friends’ unyielding attempts to bring to light what has fallen into collective oblivion and transform their trauma into a joint art project, which lends the book its title. As much about the deepest form of friendship as it is about inherited pain, the book moves with great originality between the nightmarish images of the dream and the inclination of witness literature to speak the truth.
Han Kang’s work is characterized by this double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental and physical torment with close connections to Eastern thinking. In 회복 하는 인간 = Convalescence from 2013, this involves a leg ulcer that refuses to heal and a painful relationship between the main character and her dead sister. No true convalescence ever actually takes place, and the pain emerges as a fundamental existential experience that cannot be reduced to any passing torment. In a novel such as The Vegetarian, no simple explanations are provided. Here, the deviant act occurs suddenly and explosively in the form of a blank refusal, with the protagonist remaining silent. The same can be said of the short story 에우로파 (2012; Europa, 2019), in which the male narrator, himself masked as a woman, is drawn to an enigmatic woman who has broken away from an impossible marriage. The narrative self remains silent when asked by his beloved: ‘If you were able to live as you desire, what would you do with your life?’
Anders Olsson Chair of the Nobel Committee
This above is Han Kang's biobibliography as published by the Swedish Academy.
About Janpha Thadphoothon
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