Han Kang | Chronicler of grief

South Korean author Han Kang speaks to the media during a news conference in Seoul, South Korea.
| Photo Credit: AP

In the time of two wars and little accountability, it should not come as a surprise that the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2024 has gone to South Korean writer Han Kang. Despite her “surprise” at the unexpected award — Chinese avant-garde writer Can Xue was tipped to win — Han Kang’s work is perfectly placed to reflect on situations in life which follow no reason or logic.

At least two of her novels, translated into English, use massacres on unarmed civilians and protesters as backdrops, ensuring the crimes are memorialised and not remain hidden chapters in history. The Swedish Academy hailed the 53-year-old writer “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.

Confounded by the question — ‘What is the meaning of being human?’ — Han Kang has explored this existential query in novel after novel, taking on the complex arc of human behaviour from acts of horror to moments of kindness. The “innovator in contemporary prose” has a poetic and experimental style, some would say radical, to convey her anxieties, about women and their struggle to overcome patriarchal mindsets, authoritarianism, violent putdowns, the environment, relationships and social injustices.

In a short interview after the prize, Han Kang told Swedish Academy official Jenny Rydén that readers just discovering her work should start with her 2021 novel We Do Not Part. The English translation is slated for an early 2025 release and revolves around the friendship of two women set in the time of the 1948 massacre at Jeju Island.

Past and present

She mentioned another novel Human Acts, which uses the massacre of 1980 at Gwangju, where Han Kang was born, as a backdrop to chronicle how the past tells on the present. The academy’s words that “she has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead…” is nowhere more evident than in Human Acts, where the soul of a slain student wants to see the faces of his murderers, “to hover above their sleeping eyelids like a guttering flame, to slip inside their dreams… until they hear my voice asking, demanding, why”.

The third novel she wished readers would discover is the “personal, autobiographical” novel, The White Book, “an elegy” on grief, about a sibling passing away after being alive for only hours. She rounded it off by talking about her most well-known novel, The Vegetarian, which won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, and set off a translation spree of her other works. Expanded into a three-part novel from her short story, The Fruit of My Woman, it was first published in Korea in 2007, and found readers in English when it was translated by Deborah Smith in 2015.

The protagonist, Yeong-hye, gives up eating meat, with devastating consequences. There’s a violent pushback from her husband, and other members of her family, even as Yeong-hye seeks solace in the plant world as people around her fail to understand her. In her work, there’s a correspondence between mental and physical torment with close connections to eastern thinking, Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee, noted.

For the past several years, Korean literature has been riding the Hallyu or Korean wave with the world falling in love with everything the country offers, from music, cinema, television dramas to food. Singers like Psy (‘Gangnam Style’, 2012) and bands, including BTS, are household names globally. In the last three years, several writers — Hwang Sok-yong (Mater 2-10, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae), Cheon Myeong-kwan (Whale, translated by Chi-Young Kim), Bora Chung (Cursed Bunny, translated by Anton Hur) — have been on Booker lists.

In her post-Nobel Prize interview, Han Kang said she hoped the news “is nice” for Korean literature readers. News agencies reported that Koreans flocked to bookstores to buy her books after the win; a phenomenon which is sure to be replicated all across the world.

Reuters quoted her father, the novelist Han Seung-won, as saying that the translation of her novel The Vegetarian had led to her winning, first the Man Booker International Prize and now the Nobel Prize. “My daughter’s writing is very delicate, beautiful and sad,” Han Seung-won said.

The world is waiting to discover more from Han Kang’s oeuvre. That she is deeply concerned about the human condition is evident in her stand not to celebrate the win while people die in wars.