Han Kang has been announced as the Nobel Prize winner in Literature for 2024. When the Swedish Academy announced his name, there was a rush to find out about him on social media and the Internet. Let us tell you who Han Kang is and what he writes.
Han Kang was born in 1970 in the South Korean city of Gwangju. He was nine years old when he had to go to Seoul with his family. His training is literary. His father is a renowned novelist. In addition to writing, Han also dedicated himself to art and music. This characteristic of his is reflected in all his literary writing.
In his works, Han Kang closely examines the invisible aspects of historical traumas and rules, and in each of his works he exposes the fragility of human life in a poetic spirit. His prose tells the story of the cruelty of time and society with emotional tenderness.
Han’s writings have a unique awareness of the relationship between body and soul, the living and the dead. She reached the Western world through translation and established herself as an innovative writer of contemporary prose with her poetic and experimental style.
Han Kang’s literary career began in 1993 with the publication of some poems in the magazine ‘Literature and Society’. Han’s prose writing began in 1995 with the short story collection ‘Love of Yeosu’. Shortly after, his prose works began to appear in both the novel and short story genres. This sequence still continues.
In 2002, one of his novels, ‘Your cold hands’, was published. With this he became popular in Korean society. This novel and its theme managed to establish Shilp Han in the world of writing. The novel tells the story of an artist’s internal conflict under the pretext of reproducing statues of women by a missing sculptor. This sculptor is passionate about sculpting women’s bodies in plaster of Paris. As he sculpts the beauty of the human body, his desires begin to wreak havoc on his creative experience and personality. This conflict between the repressed desires of his mind and body and his commitment to his work – what to tell, what to hide – is the basis of this novel. The novel, which is the story of a man’s struggle arising from his external perspective and his internal conflict, ends with this sentence: “Life is a sheet spread over the abyss, and we live in it like masked acrobats.”
Han Kang gained international success with his novel ‘The Vegetarian’, published in 2007. That too when the English translation of this novel by Deborah Smith was published in 2015. It received the Booker International Prize in 2016. This novel is about a woman who He thinks he is turning into a plant.
‘The Vegetarian’ is a novel divided into three parts. Her heroine is ‘Yeong-hee’, who refuses to follow the rules of food consumption. After this his life becomes a victim of violent consequences. Han draws pictures with words and explains that Yeong-hee faces a variety of completely different reactions to her decision not to eat meat. Her behavior was strongly rejected by both her husband and her authoritarian father. Hurt by this, while she lies awake in a trance, her brother-in-law, a video artist, becomes obsessed with her inert body. He seduces her and comes into contact with her in a very sensual way. He exploits her beauty. In the end, Yeong-hee is forced to seek treatment at a psychiatric clinic. Here his sister tries to save Yeong-hee and return him to a “normal” life. In this novel, the heroine Yeong-hee sinks deeper into a psychotic state expressed through “burning trees,” which symbolize the plant kingdom. This metaphor is as modern and attractive as it is dangerous.
Another novel by Han Kang, ‘The Wind Blows, Go’, was published in 2010. This novel is a long and complex novel about friendship and art. Pain and longing for change are strongly present in this novel.
Han Kang’s empathy in the narrative terrain of ‘Greek Lessons, 2023’, published in 2011, seems to be the maximum expression of his allegorical style. This is a captivating story of an extraordinary relationship between two vulnerable individuals, in which extreme physical contact, attraction and aspirations play their part. A young woman, who has lost the ability to speak due to a series of traumatic experiences, connects with one of her ancient Greek teachers, who is also losing her sight. Their imperfections and physical needs bring them closer and a fragile love story develops between them. This book is a beautiful contemplation of minds reaching the final stages of loss-gain, intimacy, and emotional language.
In the novel ‘Human Acts’, published in 2014, Han Kang has used a historical incident as the political foundation of his country. This incident occurred in the city of Gwangju. This is the city where Han herself was born, raised and is still associated with. In 1980, hundreds of students and unarmed civilians were killed by the South Korean army during a massacre. In an attempt to give a voice to the victims of history, this novel exposes the brutal reality of that episode.
Han Kang’s style is concise and dense as well as visionary. She writes that allowing the wandering spirits of the dead to separate from their bodies through this novel with its expectations is a special way of freeing them. These are unidentified corpses that cannot be buried.
Han Kang’s poetic-prosaic style appeared once again in ‘The White Book’, published in 2016. It is an elegy dedicated to a person who could have been the narrator’s older sister, but who died a few hours after birth. . Through short notes, sequences, white objects, this color of pain and sadness, he creates a work that seems less like a novel and more like a “secular prayer book.”
The narrator argues that if her imaginary sister had been allowed to live, she herself might not have been allowed to exist. It is in addressing the dead that the book reaches its final words: “Inside that white, all those white things, I will breathe the last breath you left.”
Another main work of Han Kang is his latest work ‘We Do Not Part’ published in 2021. This book is closely related to ‘The White Book’ by highlighting the feeling of pain. The story of this novel is based on the background of a massacre that took place on the island of Jeju, South Korea, in the late 1940s, where thousands of people, including children and the elderly, were shot on suspicion. to collaborate with anti-government forces.
The book portrays the shared grieving process expressed by the narrator and her friend Insian. Han Kang not only highlights the impact of the power of the past on the present, but also powerfully traces the friends’ tireless efforts to bring to light and transform some collective forgetfulness. This book is about inherited pain and the deepest form of friendship, terrifying images seen in dreams and witnesses desperate to tell the truth, recorded with great originality along with their literary inclinations.
Han Kang’s writings are characterized by the double manifestation of pain, which has a close connection with his Eastern thought. This appears to be a correspondence between physical and mental pain. The 2013 play ‘Convalescence’ is the story of a character who lives in the hope of recovery, whose leg ulcer does not heal and he enters into a painful communication relationship with his dead sister. In fact, it never provides true health benefits, and pain emerges as a fundamental existential experience, which can never be relieved by any passing suffering.
Not even in a novel like ‘The Vegetarian’ is a simple explanation given for this. Here, the deviant act occurs suddenly and explosively in the form of an absolute denial, in which the hero remains silent. The same can be said of the short story collection ‘Europa’, published in 2019, in which the narrator, himself disguised as a woman, is attracted to a mysterious woman who has been separated from an impossible marriage. She remains silent when her lover asks her this phrase: ‘If you could live the way you want, what would you do with your life? There is no room for perfection or atonement here.
The truth is that the South Korean writer Han Kang, 53, has become famous throughout the world. His portrait of the South Korean society and nation, considered relatively highly developed and civilized, connects him more with human sensitivity and pain. His dense poetic prose reaches directly to the mind. Despite the complexities of translation, his writings highlight the fragility of human life in the face of historical traumas.
Remember that Nobel Prize winners are selected by the 18-member Swedish Academy. Members of the Academy and its peer institutions, former laureates, chairs of literary committees, and professors of literature and linguistics accept nominations each winter. In the spring, a small committee narrows them down to five candidates and sends the names to the Academy, which hands out the awards in the fall, before summer arrives. All final Academy nominations are kept confidential for the next 50 years. Therefore, it is impossible to know who the other four were competing for this most respected literature award along with Han Kang. For now, many congratulations to Han Kang for the Nobel Prize in Literature! I should keep writing like this.
