Han Gang is the first Korean writer to win a Nobel Prize. Here's what you need to know about it
The Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024 was awarded to South Korean writer Han Gang "for her rich poetic prose that deals with historical traumas and reveals the fragility of human life." Yegor Mikhailov talks about the laureate and which of her books are worth reading.
Book Towers and the Gwangju Rebellion
Han Gang was born on November 27, 1970 in Gwangju City in the family of writer Han Seung-won. Their house was literally littered with books: she herself recalled that dozens of volumes stood everywhere "in disorderly towers, like in a second-hand bookstore, where the restoration of order was postponed indefinitely." Books were "half-living creatures" for her, creating a sense of comfort and security. She has read a lot of both Korean and translated literature: among her favorite works, Gan names Astrid Lindgren's The Lionheart Brothers.
When Han Kan was ten, Gwangju was rocked by mass pro-democracy protests that were brutally suppressed by the government. According to official figures, 165 protesters were killed (it is believed that these figures are underestimated by a third), thousands were injured.
Four months earlier, Han Gang's family had moved to Seoul. By pure chance, having avoided a close encounter with the tragedy, the future writer and her relatives were tormented by the "sense of survivor's guilt" for a long time. At twelve, Han Gang accidentally stumbled upon a book of photographs depicting the Gwangju massacre. The secretly distributed volume was brought by my father; The book stood in an inconspicuous corner of the bookcase with the spine inward. "I accidentally opened it without having the slightest idea of what it contained," Han Gang recalled. The theme of Gwangju, violence, trauma and the fragility of human life became central to her work.
The path to literature
As a teenager, Han Gang became interested in Russian literature - she especially highlights "long, exciting novels by Dostoevsky" and "The Death of a Poet" by Pasternak, which she reread more than once. At fourteen, Han Kan decided to devote herself to literature, inspired by writer Lim Chul-woo's short story "Sapyeong Station": "It depicts a rural railway station in the dead of a snowy night, and there is no protagonist; only the internal monologues of the passengers waiting for the last train merge together like a potpourri."
Han Gang studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. Her literary debut took place in 1993, when the magazine "Literature and Society" published five poems. The following year, her short story "The Crimson Anchor" won an award at a literary competition, and a year later, Han Gang's first collection of short stories was published.
Han Gang became world famous for the novel "Vegetarian", published in 2007. In 2016, the novel was awarded the International Booker Prize, which is awarded to authors of books writing in languages other than English, as well as their translators. This award caused great controversy in South Korea and abroad, with critics arguing that Deborah Smith was too free with the original, partly rewriting the book. Han Gang herself defended the translator, noting that the English version preserves the spirit and meaning of her work. Deborah Smith translated two more novels by Han Gang solo into English, and one with a Korean colleague.
In 2019, Han Gang became a participant in the international project "Library of the Future": her manuscript "To the Beloved Son" will be printed and read only in 2114. In addition to her, Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Elif Shafak and other star authors participate in the project. Han Gang remains the only member of the Library of the Future from Asian countries.
In the list of Nobel laureates, Han Gang also occupies a special place: she is the first South Korean writer and the first woman from Asia to be awarded this prize. "I am very happy both as a reader and as a fellow writer, because I see an important, positive trend in the fact that the award was received by a young woman who writes in a non-European language, who represents her culture and whose experience will now also be inscribed in world culture," notes writer Evgenia Nekrasova.
What she writes about
One of the key themes of Han Gang's books is the sense of loss. The writer's older sister died as an infant, but this loss remained with Han Gang forever. "When I wrote Human Actions, there was a line of dialogue: "Don't die. Please don't die," the writer recalled. "Those words were strangely familiar, they lived in me. Suddenly I discovered that it was from my mother's memories: she said that she kept repeating these words to her sister, who died before I was born." Her personal story is even more directly reflected in her White Paper, where the unnamed narrator reflects on her sister, who died shortly after birth. The book is written as a description of sixty-five white objects, from snow, salt, and sugar cubes to paper and breast milk.
Another important element of Han Gang's literary universe is language and speech, as well as their loss. In the novel Greek Lessons, a numb young woman begins to attend classes in ancient Greek in an attempt to restore speech. Her teacher gradually loses her sight, and this experience establishes a special bond between the characters. This book was published in 2011, but was translated into English only in 2023. According to Han Gang's recollections, in one year of her life, she could not write or read fiction or even watch feature films: "I spent most of my time reading books on astrophysics. The only exception was Jorge Luis Borges."
Another cross-cutting theme of Han Gang's work is violence — from specific acts of aggression described in Human Actions to a patriarchal society that takes revenge on the heroine of Vegetarian for her refusal to follow social norms. "Han Gang talks about the consequences of silent obedience in a patriarchal Korean society, about the lack of a voice and the only protest that is available – harming one's body," says writer Vera Bogdanova, who included Han Gang in the list of the most important contemporary writers in March 2024.
One of the main techniques to which Han Gang returns time and time again in his lyrics is fragmentary and polyphonic narration. Like Lim Chul Woo, who amazed her in her youth, the writer often collects her stories from tiny fragments, memories, internal monologues, forming a kind of kaleidoscope - as in the English-language edition "Greek Lessons".
What to read
Only two novels by Han Gang were published in Russian - "The Vegetarian" and "Human Actions". They were translated from Korean by Lee Sang-yun.
The Vegetarian, still Han Gang's most famous novel, is the story of a woman who refuses first meat and then all food, which becomes her radical protest against cruelty and violence in the world.
The writer calls the novel "Human Actions" (2014), in which she addresses the events of the uprising in Gwangju and tells the story on behalf of different characters, "a couple" for "The Vegetarian".
In Russia, they did not gain the same fame as in their homeland and in English-speaking countries, however, for example, the writer Daria Blagova said that "Human Deeds" is "The only book [in 2022] from which I experienced the same horror as reading the news, but at the same time I felt hope."
However, it can be assumed that the Russian-speaking reader has yet to discover Han Gang: out of a dozen of her novels and short stories, only four have even been translated into English, and the fifth, I Do Not Say Goodbye, which has already received the French Medici Prize, is being prepared for publication. Soon it will be published in Russian: the AST publishing house reports that this is "a novel-journey from death to life, about perseverance and pain, about the determination to hold on and the recognition that neither love nor sorrow has an end."
And it seems that Han Gang is not going to stop, since she can hardly be called a slow writer. "I'm always working on two or even three novels at the same time... My writing speed can't keep up with the speed of what I have here," she says in an interview and points to her own head. Han Gang worries about only one thing: that she will not have time to implement all her ideas by the end of her life.
