Han Kang

Han Kang
Han in 2024 during Nobel Week
Han Kang
Born	27 11, 1970
Birthplace	Gwangju, South Korea
Nationality	South Korean
Occupation	Writer, novelist, poet
Known for	The Vegetarian, Human Acts
Education	Yonsei University (BA)
Children	1
Awards	Yi Sang Literary Award (2005) International Booker Prize (2016) Prix Médicis étranger (2023) Nobel Prize in Literature (2024)

Han Kang (Korean: 한강; born 27 November 1970) is a South Korean writer whose experimental fiction and poetic prose have brought Korean literature to a global readership in ways few authors before her achieved. Born in Gwangju, a city scarred by the 1980 democratic uprising, Han grew up in a literary household — her father, Han Seung-won, is himself a celebrated novelist — and began her writing career as a poet before turning to fiction in the mid-1990s. She rose to international prominence with her novel The Vegetarian, which in 2016 became the first Korean-language novel to win the International Booker Prize. Her subsequent works, including Human Acts and The White Book, further established her as a writer of singular intensity, addressing themes of historical violence, bodily autonomy, grief, and the fragility of human existence. In 2024, Han was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature — making her the first Asian woman and the first Korean author to receive the honor — with the Swedish Academy citing her "intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life." From 2007 to 2018, she taught creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.

Early Life

Han Kang was born on 27 November 1970 in Gwangju, a city in South Korea's Jeolla region. Her father, Han Seung-won, is a prominent South Korean novelist, and the literary environment of her childhood played a formative role in her development as a writer. Growing up surrounded by books and literary discourse, Han was exposed from an early age to the power of narrative and language.

The city of Gwangju holds particular significance in modern South Korean history. In May 1980, when Han was nine years old, the city was the site of the Gwangju Uprising, a pro-democracy movement that was violently suppressed by the military government, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of civilians. Although Han's family moved to Seoul when she was a child, the events of the uprising left a deep imprint on her consciousness and would later become central to her literary work, most notably in her novel Human Acts.

In interviews, Han has spoken about how the memory of the Gwangju massacre haunted her upbringing and shaped her understanding of the relationship between individual bodies and collective violence. The tension between beauty and brutality, the everyday and the catastrophic, became a defining concern in her artistic vision. Her early literary inclinations manifested first through poetry; she began her public writing career as a poet before transitioning to prose fiction, and critics have frequently noted that the poetic sensibility of her early work remained a hallmark of her novels.

Education

Han Kang studied Korean literature at Yonsei University in Seoul, one of South Korea's most prestigious institutions of higher learning, where she earned a bachelor's degree. Her formal literary education at Yonsei provided her with a deep grounding in both Korean literary traditions and broader world literature. The university's emphasis on critical analysis and creative thought helped shape the intellectual framework she would bring to her fiction and poetry. Han later participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, a program that has hosted writers from around the world and facilitated cross-cultural literary exchange.

Career

Early Writing and Literary Debut

Han Kang began her professional literary career in 1993, when she published a series of poems in the South Korean literary journal Literature and Society (문학과 사회). This debut as a poet established her presence in the Korean literary scene and signaled the lyrical sensibility that would characterize her subsequent prose work. She soon turned to fiction, publishing short stories and novels throughout the late 1990s and 2000s that garnered attention within South Korea for their psychological depth and formal experimentation.

In 2005, Han received the Yi Sang Literary Award, one of South Korea's most prestigious literary honors, named after the modernist writer Yi Sang. The award recognized her growing stature in Korean letters and marked her as a significant voice in contemporary Korean fiction.

From 2007 to 2018, Han taught creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts, where she mentored a new generation of Korean writers while continuing to produce her own literary work.

The Vegetarian and International Breakthrough

Han Kang's international breakthrough came with The Vegetarian (채식주의자), a three-part novel originally published in South Korea in 2007. The novel tells the story of Yeong-hye, an ordinary woman whose sudden decision to stop eating meat sets off a chain of increasingly disturbing events that expose the violence and conformity embedded in Korean society and in family structures. The narrative is told from multiple perspectives — Yeong-hye's husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister — rather than from Yeong-hye's own point of view, a structural choice that underscores the protagonist's erasure and objectification by those around her.

The English translation of The Vegetarian, rendered by Deborah Smith, was published in 2015 and quickly attracted critical attention in the Anglophone literary world. The novel's exploration of bodily autonomy, desire, and the boundaries between the human and the vegetal resonated with readers across cultural boundaries. The New York Times reviewed the novel favorably, noting its unsettling power and the precision of its language.

In 2016, The Vegetarian won the Man Booker International Prize (now the International Booker Prize), making it the first Korean-language novel to receive the award. The prize, which recognizes a work of fiction translated into English, was shared between Han and her translator Deborah Smith. The award brought Han — and Korean literature more broadly — to the attention of a global audience in an unprecedented way.

A film adaptation of The Vegetarian was also produced, competing at the Sundance Film Festival in 2010, further extending the reach of the source material.

Human Acts

Following the success of The Vegetarian, Han Kang published Human Acts (소년이 온다), a novel that directly confronts the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980. The novel opens with the aftermath of the massacre, following the body of a young boy named Dong-ho as it lies among the dead. Subsequent chapters move forward in time, tracing the lasting impact of the violence on survivors, witnesses, and the broader Korean society across decades.

Human Acts was widely praised by critics for its unflinching depiction of state violence and its formal ambition. The Telegraph described the novel as "an emotional triumph," highlighting Han's ability to render extreme suffering without sensationalism or sentimentality. The novel's structure — shifting between first, second, and third person, and spanning multiple time periods — reinforced its central concern with the difficulty of bearing witness to atrocity and the inadequacy of any single perspective to encompass collective trauma.

The English translation of Human Acts was published by Portobello Books in the United Kingdom, further consolidating Han's reputation as a major international literary figure.

For Han, the novel represented a reckoning with the city of her birth. In interviews, she described the writing of Human Acts as a painful but necessary process — an attempt to honor the dead and to examine how a society metabolizes the memory of violence.

The White Book and Later Works

In 2016, Han Kang published The White Book (흰), a meditative work that blurs the boundaries between fiction, poetry, and essay. The book is structured as a series of short, lyrical fragments organized around the color white and themes of birth, death, and mourning. It was written in part as a meditation on the death of Han's older sister, who died shortly after birth.

The White Book was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, marking the second time one of Han's works had been recognized by the award. Critics noted that the work further demonstrated Han's range and her willingness to experiment with form, moving away from conventional narrative structures in favor of a more fragmented, associative approach.

Han continued to produce work that engaged with historical violence and collective memory. Her 2021 novel We Do Not Part (작별하지 않는다) addresses the Jeju Uprising of 1948, another episode of mass violence in Korean history. The novel follows a woman who travels to Jeju Island during a snowstorm to care for the birds of a hospitalized friend, and in the process confronts the buried history of the island's massacre. The English translation, by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, was published in 2025. The novel was short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In November 2025, it was announced that Han's first nonfiction book in English, Light and Thread, would be published the following spring, marking a new phase in her literary career.

Nobel Prize in Literature

On 10 October 2024, the Swedish Academy announced that Han Kang had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, citing her "intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life." The award made Han the first Korean author and the first Asian woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Han traveled to Stockholm in December 2024 to accept the prize during Nobel Week. In an interview recorded on 6 December 2024, she spoke about her literary process, her relationship to the Korean language, and the themes that have animated her work.

The timing of the Nobel ceremony coincided with a political crisis in South Korea. In December 2024, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol briefly declared martial law, an event that drew parallels to the authoritarian actions Han had spent her career interrogating in fiction. Commentators noted the uncanny resonance between Han's arrival in Stockholm to accept the world's most prestigious literary honor and the political turmoil unfolding in her home country.

The Nobel Prize brought renewed international attention to Han's body of work and to Korean literature as a whole. Publishers reported significant increases in sales of her translated works, and her novels were introduced or reintroduced to readers in dozens of languages.

Personal Life

Han Kang has one child. She is known for maintaining a relatively private personal life, and public information about her family beyond her father, the novelist Han Seung-won, is limited. She has lived and worked primarily in Seoul throughout her adult life.

In interviews, Han has discussed the physical and emotional toll of her writing process, particularly when engaging with traumatic historical material. She has described writing Human Acts as an experience that brought her close to the suffering she was depicting, and she has spoken about the ethical responsibilities of a writer who takes on the task of representing collective violence and grief.

Han has also spoken about the role of the body in her work — not only as a thematic concern but as a dimension of the writing experience itself. Her novels frequently explore the body as a site of both vulnerability and resistance, and she has indicated that this preoccupation is rooted in her own physical relationship with the act of writing.

Recognition

Han Kang has received numerous literary awards and honors over the course of her career. Among the most significant are:

• Yi Sang Literary Award (2005): One of South Korea's most prestigious literary prizes, awarded for excellence in Korean fiction.
• International Booker Prize (2016): Awarded for The Vegetarian, shared with translator Deborah Smith. Han was the first Korean-language author to win the prize.
• Premio Malaparte (2017): An Italian literary prize recognizing international writers of distinction. Han received the award for her novels The Vegetarian and Human Acts.
• Man Booker International Prize shortlist (2018): The White Book was shortlisted for the prize, marking the second time Han's work appeared on the Booker International list.
• Prix Médicis étranger (2023): A major French literary prize awarded to the best foreign-language novel translated into French.
• Nobel Prize in Literature (2024): The Swedish Academy recognized Han for her "intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life." She is the first Korean and the first Asian woman to receive the award.
• National Book Critics Circle Award shortlist (2026): We Do Not Part was short-listed for the award.

Han's work has been the subject of academic conferences and symposia. In April 2025, the University of Washington held a talk celebrating Han's Nobel Prize, reflecting the growing scholarly interest in her literary contributions.

Legacy

Han Kang's body of work has had a significant impact on the international reception of Korean literature. Prior to the English translation of The Vegetarian and its Booker Prize win in 2016, Korean fiction occupied a relatively marginal position in the global literary marketplace compared to literatures written in languages such as English, French, or Spanish. Han's success helped open doors for other Korean writers seeking international readership and demonstrated that Korean-language fiction could achieve both critical acclaim and commercial success abroad.

Her thematic preoccupations — the relationship between the individual body and collective violence, the ethical demands of historical memory, the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman — have resonated with readers and scholars worldwide. Critics have noted that her work draws on both the specificities of Korean history (the Gwangju Uprising, the Jeju Uprising, the experience of division and authoritarianism) and on universal concerns about suffering, autonomy, and the possibility of redemption or transformation.

The Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024 cemented Han's position as one of the most significant literary figures of her generation. The award was seen not only as a recognition of her individual achievement but also as an acknowledgment of the richness and depth of the Korean literary tradition. Commentators in South Korea and abroad noted the historical significance of the prize being awarded to a Korean writer for the first time, and to an Asian woman for the first time.

Han's influence can also be seen in the growing scholarly attention to her work. Academic conferences, university courses, and critical studies devoted to her novels have multiplied since 2016, and her texts are increasingly taught in comparative literature, postcolonial studies, and world literature programs around the globe.

The December 2024 martial law crisis in South Korea, which coincided with Han's Nobel ceremony in Stockholm, underscored the enduring relevance of her literary themes. As one commentator observed, the questions Han's fiction poses — about how societies remember violence, how power operates on bodies, and whether the dead can save the living — acquired an urgent contemporary resonance at that moment.