Han Kang is a South Korean novelist, short story writer, and poet best known for her experimental fiction dealing with historical trauma and the fragility of human life. Born in Gwangju in 1970 to a literary family, Han recounts growing up surrounded by books and the freedom to pursue reading difficult novels. Her father left his teaching position to pursue writing full-time, and the family moved from Gwangju just a few months before the 1980 Gwangju Uprising (a mass protest against the South Korean military government). Though they were suppressed, these protests played an important role in the development of democracy in South Korea. Han has stated in interviews that a sense of survivor's guilt compelled her to write her 2014 novel Human Acts. Learning about the incident when she was just 12 years old also influenced the writer's views on humanity and violence, which underlie her entire literary oeuvre.
Han studied Korean language and literature at Yonsei University. After graduating in 1993, she worked as a reporter for Saemteo magazine while simultaneously pursuing poetry. Five of Han's poems were published in the Korean literary magazine Literature and Society that same year. In 1995, Han made her debut in prose with the short story collection Love of Yeosu. At once a writer, artist, and musician, Han's literary work bears the influence of her other pursuits. For example, her 2002 novel Your Cold Hands tells the story of a sculptor obsessed with creating plaster casts of women's bodies. Han's 2014 novel The Vegetarian rose to international critical acclaim, winning the International Booker Prize in 2016. Other novels include Black Deer (1998), The Wind Blows, Go (2010), The White Book (2016), and Greek Lessons (2023). Human Acts (2014) won the Manhae Prize for Literature in 2014 and the Premio Malaparte in 2017.
In 2024, Han Kang earned the Nobel Prize in Literature, making history as the first South Korean person and the first Asian woman to win this prestigious prize.
Han Kang's Human Acts was first published serially in the online literary magazine Window from 2013 to 2014. The novel was later published in full in 2014 by Changbi Publishers, with Deborah Smith finishing an English translation in 2016. The...
The Vegetarian is a novel in three parts written by South Korean author Han Kang and translated into English by Deborah Smith, first published in 2007 in Korean and 2015 in English. The concept for the book came from a short story Han wrote ten...
