Han is only the 18th woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
At the age of 12, Han Kang found a secret “book”, stashed in a bookcase in her house in Seoul, its spine turned to the wall. It was an album, filled with photos from the 1980 massacre of student protestors in Gwangju, an event that the young Han had no knowledge of until then and which, to this day, remains largely shrouded in silence in South Korea. The images of mutilated bodies “broke some tender thing deep inside me”, she recalled years later, in an interview to The Guardian. For the 51-year-old writer, the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature — the first Korean to win the honour — the discovery laid the foundations for a lifelong literary preoccupation with the body. It became, for her, not just a site of brutality, but of ultimate resistance, raising questions about what it means to be human and capable of great violence.
These concerns are most evident in her two best-known works. In The Vegetarian (2007), which won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, Han tells the story of a woman whose revulsion to meat, formed overnight as a response to terrible dreams, leads to abuse and exploitation, and her own rejection of her body. Human Acts (2014) deals more directly with the Gwangju Uprising, an unsparing examination of the carnage. What imbues her stories of alienated individuals and fragmented societies with a universal humanity is a poetic intensity that rises above these themes of grief, trauma and horror.
Han is only the 18th woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the decision of the Swedish Academy, long accused of a male, Eurocentric bias, to award the Prize to a writer who peels back the thin skin of civilisation to lay bare the injustice underneath, there is an odd, jagged-edged poetry — one that might well have flowed out of Han’s own pen.
