Celebrated Korean novelist Han Kang reflects on the impact of winning the Nobel Prize, the nation's tumultuous history, and the intricate tapestry of human nature woven into her powerful literary works.
With protests on the streets of Seoul, the celebrated writer talks about the painful process of uncovering her country’s brutal past - and how it felt to win the Nobel prize
Han’s work gives voice to these national traumas, but its reach is universal. “What is humanity?” she asks in Human Acts. “What do we have to do to keep humanity as one thing and not another?” Her novels are not just the literature of witness, but acts of radical empathy. Han credits her migraines with giving her the humility and empathy necessary to become a writer. “Humans are fragile,” she says. Thankfully, the headaches have become much less severe since cutting out caffeine during lockdown. A few years earlier, when she was writing The Vegetarian, mysterious joint pain made the physical act of typing impossible. She wrote the first two-thirds by hand, and could only complete the last by typing with two ballpoint pens.
As with Human Acts, she started to collect historical documents and survivors’ testimonies. Her earlier research had taken in Auschwitz, Bosnia, Nanjing, and the massacre of Native Americans. “While I was writing these two books, I felt they were universal,” she explains. “The human atrocity which we have experienced throughout history and the world.”
HAN KANG NOBEL PRIZE SOUTH KOREA HISTORY LITERATURE
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