Han Kang

Han Kang is a South Korean novelist and poet whose intensely lyrical writing explores violence, memory, bodily experience, and the fragile boundaries of human identity. Born in Gwangju, South Korea, she moved with her family to Seoul during childhood, shortly before the violent suppression of the Gwangju democratic uprising in 1980. The event, which profoundly affected her understanding of history and collective suffering, would later become a central subject of her fiction. Educated in Korean literature at Yonsei University, she began her literary career as a poet before turning increasingly to fiction. Her work is distinguished by spare, evocative language and a remarkable sensitivity to the ways political violence and intimate personal experience are inscribed upon the human body. Rather than treating trauma as a distant historical event, Han investigates its persistence within memory, relationships, and everyday existence.

Her internationally celebrated novel *The Vegetarian* (2007) examines a woman's refusal to participate in ordinary social expectations, transforming an apparently simple decision into a disturbing meditation upon autonomy, desire, and bodily vulnerability. Its English translation won the International Booker Prize in 2016. In *Human Acts* (2014), Han confronted the 1980 Gwangju uprising through the experiences of its victims and survivors, while *The White Book* (2016) explored grief, absence, and the symbolic possibilities of language. *We Do Not Part* (2021) returned to historical violence through the memory of the Jeju massacres. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024, Han has established herself as an exceptionally powerful voice in contemporary world literature.