By Grace Briggs-Jones, Florrie Hulbert, Daisy Shayegan and Harry Banham
On 10 October 2024, the Swedish Academy announced Han Kang as this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The committee cited “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life” as a core motivation for her selection. Indeed, the fifty-three-year-old South Korean author began her career as a poet before transitioning to novels and short stories. Currently she has four novels translated into English: The Vegetarian (2015), Human Acts (2016), The White Book (2017) and Greek Lessons (2023) with a translation of We Do Not Part publishing in February next year.
The Nobel Prize, which has come to be one of the most esteemed awards across a range of fields, was first awarded in 1901. Its namesake, Swedish businessman Alfred Nobel, stated in his will that his fortune was to be used to reward individuals “who, during the preceding year, conferred the greatest benefit to humankind” in the areas of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace. Candidates for the prize are nominated by academy members, university professors, scientists, previous winners and members of parliamentary committees in September every year. By April of the following year, the Nobel Committee for Literature will have narrowed down the nominations to between fifteen and twenty preliminary candidates. The next month they will produce five final candidates from which the winner will be selected and announced in October.
Let us now look at three of the works specifically cited by the Nobel Committee as instrumental in Han Kang’s victory.
Han Kang’s The Vegetarian won the International Booker Prize in 2016 and is one of her most successful novels. The Vegetarian tells the story of a Korean woman who, one evening, suddenly decides to stop eating meat. Han Kang strips her of her voice, making her protagonist silent, and tells the story through three different voices instead: her husband, her brother-in-law and her older sister. The novel draws on each of their individual reactions to the protagonist’s sudden aversion to meat, with their emotions ranging from shame, horror, fetishisation and jealousy. Their emotional outbursts dramatically contrast the woman’s silence and refusal to conform to her family’s expectations, developing the novel’s commentary on the rigidity of patriarchal structures and social expectations.
Human Acts, published in 2014, is an exploration of the trauma inflicted and suffered during and after the 1980 Gwangju uprising in South Korea. The novel works around the story of Dong-ho, a young boy who is killed in the violence, and branches out to capture the experiences of other victims, survivors and those left behind. Through multiple perspectives across several decades, Human Acts is an unflinching examination of the brutality endured and the lasting scars of oppression. Han’s prose confronts the agonising cost of loss, questioning what remains of a person after they endure, witness or survive atrocity. This strident tale unearths the silent weight of collective memory, and how once such violence has been committed, it cannot ever be left in the past.
A luminous and haunting exploration of historical memory, trauma and the importance of not forgetting is portrayed in Kang’s unforgettable novel We Do Not Part. The story follows Kyungha as she makes her way from Seoul to snow-covered Jeju Island at the behest of her hospitalised friend Inseon. Battling a snowstorm, Kyungha arrives at Inseon’s home to care for her beloved pet bird but is drawn into a dark legacy. The long-buried memories and secrets of Inseon’s family passed down from mother to daughter surround Kyungha as the darkness of a massacre that scarred the island seventy years before envelopes her. Kang’s delicate and lyrical prose coupled with her ability to address complex themes of friendship, memory and national history create a novel that is not only imaginative but deeply moving. We Do Not Part provides a voice to the suppressed stories of violence and survival from the 1948 Jeju Massacre in a story that is as much an exploration of the human spirit as it is a call against historical amnesia.
A huge congratulations to Han Kang on this momentous win. Kang’s novels should definitely be on your TBR (To Be Read) list for her unique blend of lyrical prose, complex themes and exploration of human resilience. Her ability to blend reality with surreal, and often dreamlike elements, creates works that are both haunting and thought-provoking and make Kang a worthy winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature.