Han Kang, who according to her father is named after the Han River (Korean: 한강; RR: Hangang),[2] was born on 27 November 1970[3] in Gwangju, South Korea. Her family is noted for its literary background. Her father is novelist Han Seung-won. Her older brother, Han Dong-rim, is also a novelist, while her younger brother, Han Kang-in, is a novelist and cartoonist.[4]
At 9, Han moved to Suyu-ri in Seoul, when her father quit his teaching job to become a full-time writer, four months before the Gwangju Uprising, a pro-democracy movement that ended in the military's massacre of students and civilians. She first learned about the massacre when she was 12, after discovering at home a secretly circulated memorial album of photographs taken by a German journalist.[5] This discovery deeply influenced her view on humanity and her literary works.[3][6]
Han's father struggled to make ends meet with his writing career, which negatively impacted his family. Han later described her childhood as "too much for a little child"; however, being surrounded by books gave her comfort.[7] In 1988, she graduated from Poongmoon Girls' High School, now Poongmoon High School, where she had been a class president.[8][9] In 1993, Han graduated from Yonsei University, where she majored in Korean language and literature.[3] In 1998, she was enrolled at the University of Iowa International Writing Program.[3][10]
Career
After graduating from Yonsei University, Han briefly worked as a reporter for the monthly Saemteo magazine.[9] Han's literary career began the same year when five of her poems, including "Winter in Seoul", were featured in the Winter 1993 issue of the quarterly Literature and Society. She made her fiction debut the next year, under the name Han Kang-hyun, when her short story "The Scarlet Anchor" won the New Year's Literary Contest held by the Seoul Shinmun.[11][12] Her first short story collection, A Love of Yeosu, was published in 1995 and attracted attention for its precise and tightly narrated structure. After the publication, she quit her magazine job to solely focus on writing literature.[13]
In 2007, Han published a book, A Song to Sing Calmly (가만가만 부르는 노래), that was accompanied by a music album. At first she did not intend to sing, but Han Jeong-rim, a musician and music director, insisted that Han Kang record the songs herself.[14] The same year, she started working as a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts until 2018.
In her college years Han became obsessed with a line of poetry by the Korean modernist poet Yi Sang: "I believe that humans should be plants."[15] She understood Yi's line to imply a defensive stance against the violence of Korea's colonial history under Japanese occupation, and took it as an inspiration to write her most successful work, The Vegetarian. The second part of the three-part novel, Mongolian Mark, won the Yi Sang Literary Award.[16] The rest of the series (The Vegetarian and Fire Tree) was delayed by contractual problems.[15]
The Vegetarian was Han's first novel translated into English, although she had already attracted worldwide attention by the time Deborah Smith translated it.[17] The translated work won the International Booker Prize 2016 for both Han and Smith. Han was the first Korean to be nominated for the award, and, in its English translation, it was the first Korean language novel to win the International Booker Prize for fiction.[18][19][20][21]The Vegetarian was also chosen as one of "The 10 Best Books of 2016" by The New York Times Book Review.[22] The English translation, however, sparked controversy due to Smith's basic errors stemming from her unfamiliarity with the Korean language and culture, as well as her shift in style from Han's original Korean.[23]
Han's novel Human Acts was released in January 2016 by Portobello Books.[24][25] Han received the Premio Malaparte for the Italian translation of Human Acts, Atti Umani, by Adelphi Edizioni, in Italy on 1 October 2017.[26][27] The English translation of the novel was shortlisted for the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award.[28]
Han's third novel, The White Book, was shortlisted for the 2018 International Booker Prize.[29] An autobiographical novel, it centers on the loss of her older sister, a baby who died two hours after her birth.[30]
Han's novel We Do Not Part was published in 2021. It tells the story of a writer researching the 1948–49 Jeju uprising and its impact on her friend's family. The French translation of the novel won the Prix Médicis Étranger in 2023.[31]
In 2023, Han's fourth full-length novel, Greek Lessons, was translated into English by Deborah Smith and E Yaewon.[32]The Atlantic called it a book in which "words are both insufficient and too powerful to tame".[33]
Personal life
Han was married to Hong Yong-hee, a literary critic and professor at Kyung Hee Cyber University.[34][35] In 2024, Han stated that they had been divorced for many years.[36][unreliable source?] Han has a son, with whom she has run a bookstore in Seoul since 2018.[37]
Han has said that she suffers from periodic migraines, and credits them with "keeping her humble".[30]
Awards and recognition
Han won the Yi Sang Literary Award (2005) for Mongolian Mark (the second part of The Vegetarian),[16] the 25th Korean Novel Award[clarification needed] for her novella Baby Buddha in 1999, the 2000 Today's Young Artist Award from the Korean Ministry of Culture, and the 2010 Dongri Literary Award for The Wind is Blowing.[38]
In 2018, Han became the fifth writer chosen to contribute to the Future Library project. Katie Paterson, the project's organizer, said that Han had been chosen because she "expands our view of the world".[39] Han delivered the manuscript, Dear Son, My Beloved, in May 2019. In the handover ceremony, she dragged a white cloth through the forest and wrapped it around the manuscript. She explained this as a reference to Korean culture, in which a white cloth is used both for babies and for mourning gowns, describing the event as "like a wedding of my manuscript with this forest. Or a lullaby for a century-long sleep".[40]
The Vegetarian placed 49th in The New York Times's "100 Best Books of the 21st century" in July 2024.[43]
In 2024, Han was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature by the Swedish Academy for her "intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life".[44][45][46] This made her the first Korean writer[47] and the first female Asian writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.[48]
Baby Buddha and The Vegetarian have been made into films. Lim Woo-Seong wrote and directed Vegetarian, which was released in 2009.[61] It was one of only 14 selections (out of 1,022 submissions) included in the World Narrative Competition of the North American Film Fest, and was noticed at the Busan International Film Festival.[62]
Lim also adapted Baby Buddha into a screenplay, in collaboration with Han, and directed the film version. Titled Scars, it was released in 2011.[62]
^ abcd"Han Kang". Literary Encyclopedia. Archived from the original on 19 October 2021. Retrieved 10 October 2024. Ed. by Helen Rachel Cousins, Birmingham Newman University: The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 10.2.3: Korean Writing and Culture. Vol. editors: Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University)
^Fan, Jiayang (8 January 2018). "Han Kang and the Complexity of Translation". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on 9 November 2020. Retrieved 21 November 2021. In 2016, "The Vegetarian" became the first Korean-language novel to win the Man Booker International Prize, which was awarded to both its author, Han Kang, and its translator, Deborah Smith.
^Lee, Dae Woong (11 October 2024). 소설가 한강, 노벨문학상 수상 쾌거… 아시아 여성 작가 최초 ["Novelist Han Kang Makes History as the First Asian Woman to Win the Nobel Prize in Literature"]. Christian Today (in Korean). Retrieved 11 October 2024.
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