Han Kang

Han Kang was born in Gwangju in 1970, the daughter of the novelist Han Seung-won, in a family in which both her brothers also became writers. When she was nine the family moved to Seoul, a few months before the Gwangju Uprising of 1980 was crushed by the military; at twelve she came upon a clandestine album of photographs of the massacre, an encounter that shaped her sense of what human beings are capable of. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University, published poems in 1993 and her first story the following year, and later taught creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.

The Vegetarian (2007), a novel in three parts about a woman whose refusal to eat meat becomes a refusal of the violence around her, reached English readers in Deborah Smith’s translation and won the International Booker Prize in 2016. Human Acts (2014) returns to Gwangju through the dead and the survivors of the uprising; The White Book (2016) is a meditative sequence written around the elder sister who died two hours after birth; Greek Lessons places language and its loss at the centre of an encounter between two damaged people. We Do Not Part (2021), about the 1948–49 massacres on Jeju Island, won the Prix Médicis étranger. Her prose is spare and exact, moving between the vulnerable body and the memory of state violence.

In 2024 the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize for intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life. She was the first Korean writer and the first Asian woman to receive it.