Han Kang is the first Asian woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature: 7 things to know about South Korea’s literary sensation

When Han received the phone call from Sweden, she said that she was “very surprised and honoured” but didn’t make any further statement, according to The Korea Times. She declined to hold a press conference about her award.

Later, her father, Han Seung-won, explained on her behalf at a press conference at the Han Seung-won Literary School in South Jeolla Province: “She told me, [referring to the global tragedies of the Ukraine-Russia war and the Israel-Palestine conflict] ‘with the war intensifying and people being carried out dead every day, how can we have a celebration or a press conference?’”

Han won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 for The Vegetarian, a novel developed from her earlier short story that portrays a young married woman’s transformation into a tree. While the people around her think it’s a mental condition that needs to be fixed, in reality, it’s her way of discovering her true essence.

This book is celebrated for its Kafkaesque imagery and moving language that paints a haunting allegory for human cruelty. It is one of her first books to be translated into English.

Han’s literary career began in 1993 when she published five poems in the winter issue of the quarterly Literature and Society. In the following year, her short story The Red Anchor won the Spring Literary Contest hosted by the Korean newspaper Seoul Shinmun. In 1995, her prose debut came with her first story collection A Love of Yeosu, which charts her observation of a lonely and harsh world. It further garnered attention in the local literary world.

Her father Han Seung-won is a well-regarded novelist himself in South Korea, who focuses on writing stories about people’s struggle against their fate in Jangheung County, south of South Korea, where he was born. Her older brother, Han Dong-rim, is also a novelist, while her younger brother, Han Kang-in, is a novelist and cartoonist. So it isn’t hard to imagine—and as confirmed by her interview with The Nobel Prize committee—that she grew up with books both in Korean and translated languages.

Han majored in Korean language and literature at Yonsei University in Seoul, and later on enrolled at the University of Iowa’s prestigious International Writing Program, where Chinese writer Mo Yan and American poet Charles Wright also studied.

The literary path for Han hasn’t always been smooth sailing. She was once on the cultural blacklist during former president Park Geun-hye’s administration for publishing the 2014 book Human Acts: A Novel, which presents the story of the boys who tragically lost their lives during the May 18 Democracy Movement. According to former literary critic Kang Yoo-jung as reported by The Star, Han was “overtly excluded from all kinds of support and placed on the blacklist”.

The Vegetarian was also among the 2,528 books discarded from school libraries in Gyeonggi Province in 2023 for providing “inappropriate sex education material for teenagers”, according to former Democratic Party lawmaker Kang Min-jung in the same article.

That doesn’t deter Han from continuing her literary career. She will be releasing a new book titled We Do Not Part: A Novel, which is about the friendship between two women that takes readers on a journey into South Korea’s painful history. It is slated for release on January 21, 2025

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