Han Kang, the South Korean author of 2007 novel The Vegetarian inspired generations of writers. Now, she has received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Han Kang, the South Korean author best known for her surreal, subversive novel, The Vegetarian, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature – the
Mats Malm, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which organises the prize, said at a news conference in Stockholm that Han was receiving the honour “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.
The Vegetarian, published in Korea in 2007, won the 2016 International Booker Prize after it was translated into English. It centres on a depressed housewife who shocks her family when she stops eating meat; later, she stops eating altogether and yearns to turn into a tree that can live off sunlight alone. Porochista Khakpour, in a review of The Vegetarian for the New York Times, said Han “has been rightfully celebrated as a visionary in South Korea”.
Han’s Nobel was a surprise. Before the announcement on October 10, the bookmakers’ favourite for this year’s award was Can Xue, an avant-garde Chinese writer of category-defying novels. But the news was celebrated by authors and fans on social media, and greeted with fanfare in South Korea.
“This is a great achievement for South Korean literature and an occasion for national celebration,” President Yoon Suk Yeol said in a statement, in which he noted Han’s ability to capture painful episodes from their country’s recent history. Members of K-pop band BTS also celebrated, with one of them posting a crying-face emoji and a heart alongside a picture of Han.
Some in South Korea were astonished to learn a Korean writer had won. “I could not believe my eyes when I saw this news,” said Park Sang-in, an office worker in Seoul, South Korea. “No one had told us that we had a strong candidate this year.”
At the same time, many saw it as an appropriate choice. Han’s groundbreaking work has reshaped the literary landscape in South Korea, said Paige Aniyah Morris, co-translator of Han’s novel, We Do Not Part, which will be published by Hogarth in the United States in January.
“Han’s work has inspired a generation of Korean writers to be more truthful and more daring in their subject matter,” Morris said. “Time and time again, she has braved a culture of censorship and saving face, and she has come out of these attempts at silencing her with stronger, more unflinching work each time.”
Han, 53, was born in 1970 in Gwangju, South Korea. Her father was also a novelist, but much less successful. The family struggled financially and moved frequently. In a 2016 interview with the Times, Han said her transitory upbringing “was too much for a little child, but I was all right because I was surrounded by books”.
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Advertise with NZME.When Han was 9, her family moved to Seoul just months before the Gwangju uprising, when government troops fired on crowds of pro-democracy protesters, killing hundreds. The event shaped her views on humanity’s capacity for violence, Han said in the 2016 interview, and its spectre has haunted her writing. In her 2014 novel Human Acts, a writer observes a police raid on a group of activists.
She also recalled seeing images of people who lined up to donate their blood to those who were injured in the uprising.
“It was like two unsolvable riddles imprinted on my mind: How can humans be so violent, and how can humans be so sublime?” she said. “When I write novels, I find myself always returning to the theme of what it means to be human.”
Novelist Hernan Diaz praised Han’s “unique ear for the rumours of history”, adding that she can “access the traumas that have shaped and bruised entire generations, and she does so without ever turning her novels into mere didactical tools”.
Han studied literature at Yonsei University in Korea, and her first published works were poems. Her debut novel, Black Deer, which came out in 1998, was a mystery about a missing woman. In the 2016 interview, Han said it was around that time that she developed the idea for a short story about a woman who becomes a plant, which she eventually developed into The Vegetarian.
Following her debut, Han went on to write seven more novels, as well as several novellas and collections of essays and short stories. Among her other novels are The White Book, which was also nominated for the International Booker Prize, and Greek Lessons, published in English in 2023.
In Greek Lessons, a woman loses her ability to speak and tries to restore it by learning ancient Greek. Idra Novey, in a review for the Times, called the novel “a celebration of the ineffable trust to be found in sharing language”.
“Han Kang is a visionary – there’s no other word for it,” said Parisa Ebrahimi, executive editor at Hogarth, Han’s North American publisher, who noted that Han’s work reflects “remarkable insight into the inner lives of women”.
Han’s work is now celebrated in South Korea, but that took some time, she said, and some of her books were initially greeted with bafflement. The Vegetarian was received as “very extreme and bizarre”, Han said.
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Advertise with NZME.She had been publishing fiction and poetry for more than two decades before her work was issued in English, after Deborah Smith translated The Vegetarian and sold it to a British publisher based on the first 10 pages.
When the English language edition was released to acclaim in 2016, The Vegetarian helped to drive a new wave of translations of more experimental fiction, including works by women with a feminist bent.
“Her work, and the translation and success of her work, has led Korean literature in translation to be edgier and more experimental and daring,” said Anton Hur, a South Korean translator and author based in Seoul. “She changed the conversation about Korean literature.”
Ankhi Mukherjee, a literature professor at the University of Oxford, said she had taught Han’s work “year in, year out” for almost two decades. “Her writing is relentlessly political – whether it’s the politics of the body, of gender, of people fighting against the state – but it never lets go of the literary imagination,” Mukherjee said, adding: “It’s never sanctimonious; it’s very playful, funny and surreal.”
The Nobel Prize is literature’s preeminent award, and winning it is a capstone to a writer, poet or playwright’s career. Past recipients have included Toni Morrison, Harold Pinter and, in 2016, Bob Dylan. Along with the prestige and a huge boost in sales, the new laureate receives 11 million Swedish krona (about $1.7m).
Although relatively young for a Nobel laureate, Han is far older than Rudyard Kipling was when he accepted the 1907 award at 41.
In recent years, the academy has tried to increase the diversity of authors considered for the literature prize, after facing criticism over the low number of laureates who were female or came from outside Europe and North America.
Since 2020, the Academy has awarded the prize to one person of colour – Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian writer whose novels dissect the legacy of colonialism – as well as two women: Louise Gluck, the American poet, and Annie Ernaux, the French writer of autobiographical works.
Last year’s recipient was Jon Fosse, a Norwegian author and playwright whose novels, told in lengthy sentences, often contain religious undertones.
Han is the 18th woman to win the Nobel in literature, which has been awarded to 120 writers since 1901.
Some scholars and translators said it was fitting that the first Korean writer to win a Nobel is a woman. Much of the most groundbreaking and provocative contemporary Korean literature is being written by female novelists, including some who are challenging and exposing misogyny and the burdens that are placed on women in South Korea. Yet in media and literary circles, older male writers have often been seen as the most likely contenders for the Nobel.
“For years now, the conversation about how to get Korea its literature prize has not once seemed to seriously consider that the answer might be Han Kang, despite her massive success,” said Morris, who in addition to translating Han has translated work by Korean women such as Pak Kyongni and Ji-min Lee. “So it’s a pleasant surprise and a bit of poetic justice to see a woman become the one to end Korea’s literature Nobel drought.”
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
Written by: Alex Marshall and Alexandra Alter
Photographs by: Jean Chung
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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