You’d be hard pressed to find anyone here who had anticipated that Han Kang would be awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in literature, the world’s highest literary honor.
Although the South Korean novelist had already tallied up a number of other prestigious international accolades and is widely read here, she is 53, and the award traditionally favors writers in the twilight of their careers.
“I thought that she might win it one day, but I didn’t expect it to be so soon,” said Jeong Kwa-ri, a literary critic and former professor of Korean literature at Yonsei University, Han’s alma mater. “Most of the South Korean writers who have been seen as top contenders are in their 70s and 80s.”
Recognized last week by the Swedish Academy “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,” Han is the first Asian woman to win the literature Nobel in its 123-year-old history and the second South Korean Nobel laureate. Then-President Kim Dae-jung was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 for his diplomacy with North Korea.
Han has kept a low profile following the win, reportedly refusing a celebration her father planned, citing the wars still raging in Gaza and Ukraine. But the rest of the country has been abuzz with “Han Kang Syndrome.”
As of Tuesday, the country’s book retailers have reported more than 800,000 sales of Han’s works and expect to hit the 1 million mark by the end of the week. Stores, dealing with long lines, are rapidly selling out, and printing presses have been working around the clock to produce more.
Han, who was born in 1970 in the city of Gwangju, comes from a literary family. Her father is Han Sung-won, a famous novelist who has cheerfully noted that his daughter’s stature has eclipsed his own.
“It used to be that Han Kang was known as Han Sung-won’s daughter, but now I’ve become Han Sung-won, the father of Han Kang,” he said in an interview in 2016.
Many of Han’s novels are intimate portraits of violence inflicted on ordinary lives, spanning both South Korea’s long history of authoritarian rule and the feminist struggles of the present.
Among her best-known works in South Korea is “Human Acts,” a novel about the Chun Doo-hwan military dictatorship’s massacre of civilians in 1980 following pro-democracy protests in the city of Gwangju.
Public debate about the massacre has long been an irritant for South Korean conservatives, who have at times sought to downplay the government’s role or promoted conspiracy theories that the protests were an act of North Korean subterfuge.
Under the conservative administration of former President Park Geun-hye, the daughter of another military dictator, Han was placed on a blacklist in 2014, barring her from receiving government support, along with other creatives deemed to be ideologically undesirable.
Told through multiple perspectives, “Human Acts” draws inspiration from real-life figures, including Moon Jae-hak, a high school student who was shot to death by junta forces deployed to Gwangju.
“I was so happy that I thought my heart would stop,” Kim Kil-ja, Moon’s mother, said of Han’s Nobel in an interview with local media. “Her book has managed to spread the truth about the incident to the world.”
Han’s own recommendation for those just diving into her work is “We Do Not Part,” a novel that explores a civilian massacre the South Korean government committed on the island of Jeju in 1948, a period of anti-communist paranoia. The English translation of the novel, which won France’s Prix Médicis award last year, is due in January 2025.
But the most famous — and notorious — of Han’s oeuvre is “The Vegetarian,” a darkly surreal tale about a woman who spirals into madness after vowing to give up meat. Lauded as a parable about female resistance against patriarchal South Korean society, the novel won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, an honor shared by Han and her British translator, Deborah Smith.
But the award placed the book at the center of a fierce debate about literary translations. Critics said the award-winning English translation by Smith, who had only started learning Korean a few years earlier, not only committed basic errors — such as confusing the Korean word for “foot” with “arm” — but altered the text far beyond the acceptable parameters of translation.
“Translations of Korean literature have long suffered from many obstacles, with more ‘pure’ translations failing to find success,” Jeong, the literary critic, said.
The question has long preoccupied the country’s literary scene, which has watched South Korea’s film and television industries produce worldwide hits like “Parasite” or “Squid Game” while wondering why South Korean books have failed to capture the same level of global interest.
“As a result of that, there has been an increasing tendency in translation to overlook disfigurations of the original text in favor of conforming to foreign readers’ tastes,” Jeong said. “‘The Vegetarian’ is a prime example of that.”
Writing for The Times in 2016, Charse Yun, a Korean American literary translator, acknowledged Smith’s “exquisite” sentences but said that the translation had ”morphed into a ‘new creation.’”
“I find it hard to come up with an adequate analogy, but imagine the plain, contemporary style of Raymond Carver being garnished with the elaborate diction of Charles Dickens,” he wrote.
Defending her work in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2018, Smith, who has translated two more of Han’s books, argued that, given the differences in any two languages, “there can be no such thing as a translation that is not ‘creative.’”
For many critics, the translation question is still an open one. But for better or worse, Han’s latest and most prestigious honor has now cemented the playbook for Korean literature’s global success.
Despite his doubts about Smith’s translation, Yun today sees plenty of reasons to be optimistic.
“The field was greatly opened and more people were able to access Korean literature,” Yun said of Han’s global rise.
“I’m just happy for my former students and other talented translators out there that now have an opportunity to bring other Korean voices to the field.”