Han Kang is the author of novels including 'Human Acts', 'Greek Lessons', 'Your Cold Hands', 'The Wind Blows, Go', 'The Vegetarian' and more. Her stories are boundary-defying, provocative, sensual, visceral and often shocking.
When Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (her first novel to be translated from Korean into English) won the 2016 Man Booker Prize, a friend gifted me a copy. “What’d you think of it?” I asked, pocketing the book with thanks. “It’s a strange book,” my friend said. “But life is strange,” she added, still in a daze from just having finished reading it.
Han Kang—the 2024 Nobel Laureate for literature—is the author of several novels, short stories, poems, children’s books, and essays. Her novels include Human Acts, Greek Lessons, Your Cold Hands, We Do Not Part, The Wind Blows, Go and The White Book. The Vegetarian, exquisitely translated into English by Deborah Smith, earned the South Korean writer international recognition. The book pushes boundaries, defies classification, and much like everything else Han has written, asks the all-important question: How to live a life in this strange world we occupy?
At the Prize announcement ceremony, the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Committee praised Han’s “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life” and “her empathy for vulnerable, often female lives…” Han is the first South Korean writer to be awarded the Nobel for Literature. The win makes her the 18th woman, and the first Asian woman, to receive the Prize (among 120 literature Laureates). The world clearly remains a biased place and the fictional worlds Han creates mirror the imbalances.
Loss, grief, doubt, pain and fear haunt the characters she fleshes out. Dark shadows roam, tensions simmer, and readers must brace themselves against raw outbursts of violence. The body and mind are hemmed in by existing systems, and both defiantly search for ways to break free. Language is connection, language alienates. Love liberates, love enslaves. Desire is salvation, desire is despair. Memory heals, memory of trauma is passed on like poison from generation to generation. Han’s works pulse with the messy contradictions of human existence, the tangles that push some to the edge of madness. Her stories are boundary-defying, provocative, sensual, visceral, and often shocking. They raise questions about our lives that are hard to ignore.
In her novel, Your Cold Hands, a sculptor obsessively makes plaster casts of women’s bodies and the character’s preoccupation with the body nudges readers to think deeply about what the body reveals and what it hides, and the elements of performance and authenticity in human relationships. One among the many startling insights the novel offers: “Life is a sheet arching over an abyss, and we live above it like masked acrobats.” In Greek Lessons, the power of speech slips away from the traumatised young heroine. Meanwhile, her teacher’s eyesight is fading. Loss and love entwine in surprising ways and the two lost characters connect—an unusual love story blooms. Han pays a tender tribute to language and intimacy in Greek Lessons while laying bare the anatomy of loss.
Lyrical and formally inventive, The White Book also plumbs the depths of loss. Here, the narrator mourns her dead sibling in a series of notes. All of the notes revolve around white objects. White, “the colour of grief”, is the axis on which the book spins. The living and the dead are in communion here; the walls between their worlds wafer-thin; the flesh and the spirit inseparable on the pages. In the end, the narrator reassures herself and her sister: “Within that white, all of those white things, I will breathe in the final breath you released.”
Some actual historical events have also sparked Han’s imagination. Her novel, Human Acts, gives a voice to the students and civilians who were massacred by the South Korean military at Gwangju city in 1980. The narrative bears witness to the brutality of the real-life massacre without flinching. But it cleverly breaks the mould of witness literature and upends readers’ expectations by introducing an unexpected stylistic device: the souls and the bodies of the victims separate, and the affected characters have the power to watch their own annihilation. Though seeped in contemporary history, Human Acts has the philosophical complexity of a Greek tragedy.
A different real-life atrocity compelled Han to write her novel, We Do Not Part. In it, the memory of the horrific violence perpetrated on the residents of Jeju Island in South Korea darkens the fictional present. Many innocent islanders, accused of being collaborators, were shot dead in the 1940s. The novel imagines the trajectories of the lives of later generations, who are scarred by the disaster and are making an effort to heal. Powerful imagery and incandescent prose explore the nuances of inherited trauma, the past and its iron grip on the present, the rituals of shared mourning, and the comfort of friendship.
Many of the characters in Han’s books bear the weight of historical traumas and are forced to confront the ghosts of the past. The living and the dead are not strictly cordoned off from each other and so, encounters of the strange kind abound. The body is vulnerable as is the human heart. Han’s fiction handles our frailties with care while bravely experimenting with style and form. She invents a unique vocabulary for the human experience: shocking, thought-provoking, and thoroughly contemporary.