Happy Friday, readers, writers, and shark fans! We’re very excited to share that the results are in for the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the winner is none other than the incredible Human Acts author, Han Kang.

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2024 is awarded to the South Korean author Han Kang, “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

If you’re new to Han Kang’s work, we strongly recommend starting with these three incredible works: Human Acts, The Vegetarian, and Greek Lessons.

Greek Lessons by Han Kang

Hogarth (April 18, 2023), 176 pages

ASIN: ‎B0B6Z895FB

$4.99

This short but intense and psychologically penetrating novel is an intimate portrait of two individuals who have lost, or are in of the process of losing, the most vital links that connect them to the exterior world. After having suffered domestic abuse the female protagonist has retreated into muteness, while the male protagonist slowly is losing his sight due to a hereditary disease. In order to regain an ability to communicate the woman is taking courses in Ancient Greek – since a language no longer spoken will not be able to hurt her – while the man losing his sight is her Greek teacher. A delicate love story of sorts, the novel traces their attempt to if not to overcome so at least try to find common ground in their shared bereavement. It’s also a book about language, how words can help us give shape and meaning to our outer and inner world but also tear at and destroy what is most delicate in all of us: our identity.

Human Acts by Han Kang

Hogarth; Reprint edition (January 17, 2017), 213 pages

ASIN: ‎B01EQ2S3J2

$13.99

As in her latest novel, We Do Not Part, scheduled for publication in English in January 2025, Human Acts takes an oblique, but terrifying and totally convincing look at her country’s not-so-distant past. Through many different ever-shifting perspectives, which create an almost unbearable narrative suspense, the novel chronicles the lives of many people either taking part, or as victims innocently being caught up in a student uprising in May 1980 in the town of Gwangju, where the author spent her childhood and early youth, an uprising that was brutally crushed by the then ruling military junta. As in many other of her works, the border between perpetrator and victim, body and soul, or even between living and dead, is fluctuating, which is reflected in a language both straight-forward and subtle. Han gives in this and several other novels a new meaning to the expression “living with the past,” considered as remnants of a reality that you can neither shy away from nor resist. Through her honest and truly awe-inspiring literary works we live and relive our pasts continuously.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Hogarth; Reprint edition (February 2, 2016), 185 pages

ASIN: ‎B00X2F7NRI

$12.99

The Vegetarian is Han Kang’s international breakthrough novel which won the International Booker prize in 2016. It’s the story of a middle-aged Korean woman who one night suddenly decides not to eat meat anymore. The vegetarian herself is silent in the novel, her story is instead told in three different narratives by her husband, her brother-in-law, and her older sister (in that order). Their different reactions, from abhorrence to sexual fascination to poisonous envy, stand in sharp contrast to the woman’s own mute refusal to back down or to admit to any guilt for the shame she has brought to her family. Through these responses, we get a sharp portrait of a patriarchal society obsessed with careerism and rigid sometimes tyrannical social norms and conventions.

Though Han Kang was specifically selected for “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,” Anders Olsson, the Chairman of the Nobel Committee, also wrote a thorough think piece on Kang’s writing history and literary features:

한강 Han Kang was born in 1970 in the South Korean city of Gwangju before, at the age of nine, moving with her family to Seoul. She comes from a literary background, her father being a reputed novelist. Alongside her writing, she has also devoted herself to art and music, which is reflected throughout her entire literary production.

Han Kang began her career in 1993 with the publication of a number of poems in the magazine 문학과사회 (“Literature and Society”). Her prose debut came in 1995 with the short story collection 여수의 사랑 (“Love of Yeosu”), followed soon afterwards by several other prose works, both novels and short stories. Notable among these is the novel 그대의 차가운 손 (2002; “Your Cold Hands”), which bears obvious traces of Han Kang’s interest in art. The book reproduces a manuscript left behind by a missing sculptor who is obsessed with making plaster casts of female bodies. There is a preoccupation with the human anatomy and the play between persona and experience, where a conflict arises in the work of the sculptor between what the body reveals and what it conceals. ‘Life is a sheet arching over an abyss, and we live above it like masked acrobats’ as a sentence towards the end of the book tellingly asserts.

Han Kang’s major international breakthrough came with the novel 채식주의자 (2007; The Vegetarian, 2015). Written in three parts, the book portrays the violent consequences that ensue when its protagonist Yeong-hye refuses to submit to the norms of food intake. Her decision not to eat meat is met with various, entirely different reactions. Her behaviour is forcibly rejected by both her husband and her authoritarian father, and she is exploited erotically and aesthetically by her brother-in-law, a video artist who becomes obsessed with her passive body. Ultimately, she is committed to a psychiatric clinic, where her sister attempts to rescue her and bring her back to a ‘normal’ life. However, Yeong-hye sinks ever deeper into a psychosis-like condition expressed through the ‘flaming trees’, a symbol for a plant kingdom that is as enticing as it is dangerous.

A more plot-based book is 바람이 분다, 가라 (“The Wind Blows, Go”) from 2010, a large and complex novel about friendship and artistry, in which grief and a longing for transformation are strongly present.

Han Kang’s physical empathy for extreme life stories is reinforced by her increasingly charged metaphorical style. 희랍어 시간 (Greek Lessons, 2023) from 2011 is a captivating portrayal of an extraordinary relationship between two vulnerable individuals. A young woman who, following a string of traumatic experiences, has lost the power of speech connects with her teacher in Ancient Greek, who is himself losing his sight. From their respective flaws, a brittle love affair develops. The book is a beautiful meditation around loss, intimacy and the ultimate conditions of language.

In the novel 소년이 온다 (2014; Human Acts, 2016), Han Kang this time employs as her political foundation a historical event that took place in the city of Gwangju, where she herself grew up and where hundreds of students and unarmed civilians were murdered during a massacre carried out by the South Korean military in 1980. In seeking to give voice to the victims of history, the book confronts this episode with brutal actualization and, in so doing, approaches the genre of witness literature. Han Kang’s style, as visionary as it is succinct, nevertheless deviates from our expectations of that genre, and it is a particular expedient of hers to permit the souls of the dead to be separated from their bodies, thus allowing them to witness their own annihilation. In certain moments, at the sight of the unidentifiable corpses that cannot be buried, the text harks back to the basic motif of Sophocles’s Antigone.

In 흰 (2016; The White Book, 2017), Han Kang’s poetic style once again dominates. The book is an elegy dedicated to the person who could have been the narrative self’s elder sister, but who passed away only a couple of hours after birth. In a sequence of short notes, all concerning white objects, it is through this colour of grief that the work as a whole is associatively constructed. This renders it less a novel and more a kind of ‘secular prayer book’, as it has also been described. If, the narrator reasons, the imaginary sister had been allowed to live, she herself would not have been permitted to come into being. It is also in addressing the dead that the book reaches its final words: ‘Within that white, all of those white things, I will breathe in the final breath you released.’

Another highlight is the late work, 작별하지 않는다 (“We Do Not Part”) from 2021, which in terms of its imagery of pain is closely connected to The White Book. The story unfolds in the shadow of a massacre that took place in the late 1940s on South Korea’s Jeju Island, where tens of thousands of people, among them children and the elderly, were shot on suspicion of being collaborators. The book portrays the shared mourning process undertaken by the narrator and her friend Inseon, who both, long after the event, bear with them the trauma associated with the disaster that has befallen their relatives. With imagery that is as precise as it is condensed, Han Kang not only conveys the power of the past over the present, but also, equally powerfully, traces the friends’ unyielding attempts to bring to light what has fallen into collective oblivion and transform their trauma into a joint art project, which lends the book its title. As much about the deepest form of friendship as it is about inherited pain, the book moves with great originality between the nightmarish images of the dream and the inclination of witness literature to speak the truth.

Han Kang’s work is characterized by this double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental and physical torment with close connections to Eastern thinking. In 회복 하는 인간 = Convalescence from 2013, this involves a leg ulcer that refuses to heal and a painful relationship between the main character and her dead sister. No true convalescence ever actually takes place, and the pain emerges as a fundamental existential experience that cannot be reduced to any passing torment. In a novel such as The Vegetarian, no simple explanations are provided. Here, the deviant act occurs suddenly and explosively in the form of a blank refusal, with the protagonist remaining silent. The same can be said of the short story 에우로파 (2012; Europa, 2019), in which the male narrator, himself masked as a woman, is drawn to an enigmatic woman who has broken away from an impossible marriage. The narrative self remains silent when asked by his beloved: ‘If you were able to live as you desire, what would you do with your life?’ There is no room here for either fulfillment or atonement.

In her oeuvre, Han Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose.

Anders Olsson
Chairman of the Nobel Committee

We at Lit Shark again want to extend our greatest congratulations to Han Kang for her accomplishments and her grand recognition via the Nobel Prize in Literature and many other accolades. Though we haven’t reviewed her work at Lit Shark yet, we are fans of her sharp, biting literary and poetic prose, and we’re excited to review her next book when it appears on the literary scene. 

HAN KANG was born in Gwangju in 1970. Since the age of ten, She grew up in Suyuri, Seoul after her family moved there. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. She made her literary debut as a poet by publishing five poems, including “Winter in Seoul”, in the winter issue of Munhak-gwa-sahoe (Literature and Society) in 1993. She began her career as a novelist the next year by winning the 1994 Seoul Shinmun Spring Literary Contest with “Red Anchor”. She published her first short story collection entitled Yeosu (Munji Publishing Company) in 1995. She participated in the University of Iowa International Writing Program for three months in 1998 with support from the Arts Council Korea.

Her publications include a short story collection, Fruits of My Woman (2000), Fire Salamander (2012); novels such as Black Deer (1998), Your Cold Hands (2002), The Vegetarian (2007), Breath Fighting (2010), and Greek Lessons (2011), Human Acts (2014), The White Book (2016), I Do Not Bid Farewell(2021). A poem collection, I put the evening in the drawer (2013) was published as well.

She won the 25th Korean Novel Award with the novella, “Baby Buddha” in 1999, the 2000 Today’s Young Artist Award by Culture Ministry Korea, the 2005 YiSang Literary Award with “Mongol Spot”, and the 2010 Dongri Literary Award with The Wind is Blowing.

She was awarded Manhae literary prize for Human Acts (2014) and Hwang Sun-won literary award (2015) for the novella While One Snowflake Melts. Her recent novella Farewell won the Kim Yujung Literary Prize.(2018).

The Vegetarian won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. Atti umani (Human Acts) won the 2017 Malaparte Prize in Italy. She was awarded San Clemete Prize for The Vegetarian in spain(2019). She was selected as the fifth writer for the Future Library project in Norway in 2019. “Dear Son, My Beloved,”will be held in the Deichman Library in Oslo until its scheduled publication in 2114.

Her most recent novel ‘I Do Not Bid Farewell’ was awarded Medicis prize in France in 2023, Émile Guimet prize in 2024.