On Thursday the Swedish Academy awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature to Han Kang, “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.
Han is the first South Korean author to win the award, and, at 53 years old, a relatively young winner of a prize awarded for a whole body of work.
She was born in the south-western city of Gwangju in 1970. Her 17 books – primarily novels, as well as novellas, short stories and some poetry – have garnered her numerous literary accolades in South Korea, as well as in France, where last year she won the Prix Médicis étranger – awarded to an author “whose fame does not yet match his talent”. The Nobel may well change that.
In the Anglophone world she is best known for The Vegetarian, published in South Korea in 2007 and then translated by Deborah Smith. The novel tells of a woman in modern-day Seoul who, after having a dream about the violence of humankind, decides to stop eating meat, and then to stop eating at all. The events that follow are catastrophic.
The novel is a difficult read, full of force-feeding and not necessarily consensual sex. That it is told from the abusive husband’s point of view makes it all the bleaker. But its power lies in the questions it raises about the powerlessness of the individual under patriarchy.
The story of Han’s work in English is revealing of the state of British publishing in translation. The Vegetarian was published in English in 2015 by the now closed Portobello Books. The novel won the International Booker prize in 2016, and Smith used her half of the £50,000 prize money to found the publishing house Tilted Axis Press, which focuses on publishing Global Majority language authors into English. But today Tilted Axis’s future is uncertain: a crowdfunder was recently launched to ensure it doesn’t go the way of Portobello Books.
Seven years after Han’s International Booker win, just four of her books are available in English. Her novels are sometimes tricksy or oblique: they are not straightforward stories with clearly decipherable messages, which perhaps makes them a harder sell. Greek Lessons, published in English in 2023, tells of a woman who can’t speak. She attends classes in ancient Greek “because she wants to reclaim language of her own volition”. There she finds her teacher is losing his sight. The book is full of incisive individual images, but resists easy interpretation.
Han’s novel Human Acts, published in English in 2016, is a gruesome retelling of the aftermath of the 1980 South Korean military dictatorship’s violent suppression of student protesters in Gwangju. The White Book, an autobiographical novel about the author’s sister, who died two hours after she was born, is similarly graphic. Han has acknowledged the cruelty in her work: “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,” she said in an interview in 2016. “You could say that my books are variations on this theme of human violence.”
Yet readers – and the Nobel committee – find profundity in Han’s writing. The novelist Deborah Levy told the New Statesman: “A truly luminous Nobel winner, Han Kang is the deepest and lightest of writers. Her crystalline, modernist prose is acutely beautiful and profound. If I had to conjure an image for her writing, it would be something like a vigilant swan sitting in the middle of a societal emergency. Han Kang is not a purveyor of baggy realism, but she does real pain, real human relations; sometimes she even reaches for transcendence and gets somewhere close.”
Fortunately, Anglophone readers don’t have to wait long for further opportunity to experience Han Kang’s work. In February 2025 Hamish Hamilton will publish We Do Not Part, which explores the long shadow of the 1948 uprising and massacre on South Korea’s Jeju Island: another tale of the present-day impact of historic violence.
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