Han Kang

Han Kang is the South Korean author who became, in October 2024, the first Asian woman and the first Korean writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature — an event that felt not like a surprise but like a long overdue recognition of a body of work of extraordinary moral and aesthetic seriousness. Born in Gwangju in 1970 and the daughter of novelist Han Seung-won, she published her first novel in 1994 and has written with increasing ambition and urgency across three decades.

Her novel The Vegetarian (2007), in Deborah Smith's translation, won the International Booker Prize in 2016 and introduced her to international readers: the story of a woman who, following a disturbing dream, refuses to eat meat, and the violence with which her family and society respond to her refusal. In subsequent works — Human Acts, a harrowing account of the 1980 Gwangju Massacre; The White Book, a meditation on grief and her mother's lost baby; The Impossible Goodbye; We Do Not Part — Han Kang has established herself as a writer for whom literature is an act of witness, a refusal to look away from what suffering does to the human body and the human soul.