If you have read We Do Not Part, you wouldn’t be surprised to know that Han Kang, the first South Korean to win Nobel Prize in Literature and the International Booker, began her career as a poet. At the same time, it is no surprise either that this is what she has to say about her works: “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. my books are variations on this theme of human violence.” The essence of Han’s writing is in how she employs poetry to write about violence. The result are stories that feel light as a snowflake and heavier than a head wound. The Nobel Committee, when they announced Han Kang as the recipient of the 2024 Nobel in Literature, commented on her work:
In her oeuvre, she confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose.
Han Kang – Facts – 2024. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach 2025. Wed. 26 Feb 2025. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2024/han/facts/
Han Kang: A Short Biography
Han Kang was born in 1970 in Gwangju, a city in the south-west of South Korea. Her father named her after the Han River.
Han grew up in a literary household. She moved with her family moved to Seoul when she was nine years old. Her father had quit his job as a teacher to work full-time as a novelist. He did not find material success, and this impacted his family. Books were a source of comfort for his children, however. Han’s elder brother is a novelist, the younger a novelist and cartoonist.
She studied Korean Literature at Yonsei University in Seoul. In 1993, the year she graduated, she published some of her poems in a literary magazine. Two years later, she published her first book of short stories, Yeosu. In 1998, she participated in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program and published her first novel, Geomeun saseum.
Chaesikjuuija (2006) was the first of her novels to be translated into English, as Vegetarian in 2015. It immediately earned her a Western audience, and she won the Booker Prize in 2016 for the novel. Since then, four more of her novels have been translated into English. With her Nobel win, hopefully more of her works will be translated and accessible to a diverse audience.
From 2007 to 2018, Han Kang taught creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. Then, she and her son ran Onulbooks, a bookstore in Seoul. With a collection curated by Han Kang herself, handwritten recommendations, book clubs, a “public phone booth” which plays voice recordings of writers, and much more, Onulbooks showcases Korea’s writers and her Nobel Laureate at the same time. When she won the Nobel, fans gathered at Onulbooks. Speaking to The Guardian after her win last year, Han Kang says, “It was a secret for a while, but not any longer since last autumn.” She has now handed over its daily running to the manager.
Han is a private person. When she won the Nobel, according to Vulture, Korean news outlets reported she was married to literary critic Hong Yong-hee, even though they had been divorced for many years. The Guardian interview mentioned above recounts in delightful detail how she spent the night the Prize was announced, including the fact that she turned her phone off and decided to drink some chamomile tea with her son.
The Impact of the Gwangju Massacre
In May 1980, only four months after Han and her family had moved to Seoul, the Gwangju Uprising took place. The mass protest against the military government that took place in the city between May 18 and 27 was met with brutal violence. Later, it would be considered a vital moment in South Korea’s fight for democracy: in the late 1990s, direct presidential elections was reinstituted, and South Korea had its first democratically elected President in 1993. When it happened though, the message sent by brutal suppression overwhelmed everything else, and the protest did not seem to have changed anything. Violence left its enduring mark.
For years, news of the Gwangju Uprising was suppressed. South Koreans had to mourn something they couldn’t talk about, not when the closest relationships could shatter under the gun. It feels like a miracle then that we have some pictures and stories of the uprising. The photographer for the image below, for instance, remained unknown for years. The photographer, Na Kyung Taek, says, “South Korean democracy began in Gwangju,” he said. “I just did what little I could for its citizens.” Another of his photographs, of a bloodied student being clubbed by a paratrooper, was the first image to be leaked out of Gwangju and into the world. (The story of how these photographs managed to survive and spread, and what Na Kyung Taek has been up to, makes for fascinating reading.)
Han Kang discovered the massacre when she was twelve years old from a hidden book of photographs, like the narrator of her novel Human Acts. Her family’s move from Gwangju only a few months before such violence took place filled her with a sense of survivor’s guilt. The Gwangju Uprising leaves its mark on all of her writing, which examines again and again humanity’s great capacity for love and for violence. Life is always breakable, but all of its beauty is rooted in fragility.
Novels by Han Kang, Translated into English
My books have taken me anywhere from a year to seven years to complete, for which I have exchanged considerable portions of my personal life. This is what draws me to the work. The way I can delve into, and dwell in, the questions I feel are imperative and urgent, so much so that I decide to accept the tradeoff.
Each time I work on a novel, I endure the questions, I live inside them. When I reach the end of these questions – which is not the same as when I find answers to them – is when I reach the end of the writing process. By then, I am no longer as I was when I began, and from that changed state, I start again. The next questions follow, like links in a chain, or like dominoes, overlapping and joining and continuing, and I am moved to write something new.
Han Kang – Facts – 2024. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach 2025. Wed. 26 Feb 2025. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2024/han/facts/
The Vegetarian
Nightmares torture Yeong-hye, dreams of blood and brutality. She decides to go vegetarian, but having this little amount of control over herself does not go down well with her husband and his family. They try their best to reassert control, while Yeong-hye tries her best to hold on to it, however little it is.
Greek Lessons
A young woman who has lost attends Greek lessons in Seoul. Her teacher is drawn to her, both united by pain. Themes of loneliness and suffering that characterize Han’s works are here too, but they are softened by the human connection at the center of the novel.
Human Acts
Han Kang’s depiction of the Gwangju Uprising skips the event itself and begins with its aftermath. The reader is greeted by a pile of bodies and endless blood. The story is told in interconnected chapters from multiple perspectives. Collective stories of violence, heartbreak, and hope try to give voice to a silenced people.
The White Book
A nameless writer focuses on the color white while taking part in a residency. Focusing on the color, she attempts to understand her older sister’s death. As always, Han beautifully explores the fragility and strength of the human spirit.
We Do Not Part
Based on the Jeju Masacre, We Do Not Part is Han Kang’s latest work to be translated into English, published after she won the Nobel. A delicate, heartbreaking yet hopeful story, We Do Not Part deals with all of Han’s usual concerns, all covered in a silent layer of snow. A gorgeous, delicate, painful, book.
We featured We Do Not Part as one of the books in our February 2025 Book Box, To subscribe to our book box, click here.
