In 2016, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian turned the primary Korean language novel to win the Man Booker Worldwide Prize. A deeply ruminative e-book concerning the penalties of quiet however absolute resistance, The Vegetarian focuses on housewife Yeong-Hye and her resolution to cease consuming meat. Colonialism, patriarchy, violence and meat consuming grow to be intimately entangled as numerous relations — Yeong Hye’s controlling husband, her obsessive brother-in-law, and her overwhelmed sister — reply to Yeong-Hye’s vegetarianism and her rising want to grow to be a plant.
If The Vegetarian marked Han’s ascendancy within the Anglophone sphere, then the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded on October 10, conferred international recognition to her complete physique of labor. Han can be the primary South Korean Literature laureate. In a press launch saying the award, the Royal Swedish Academy lauded Han “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historic traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.
Han was born in Gwangju in 1970 to a literary household. Her father is a celebrated novelist, and each her brothers are writers. In 1980 the household moved to Seoul and Han went on to review Korean Literature at Yonsei College. Although Han has been publishing since 1993, The Vegetarian — first printed in 2007 — was her first novel to be translated into English.
Han’s writing constitutes a various physique of labor
Human Acts (2014) explores the Gwangju bloodbath of 1980, when peaceable pupil demonstrations have been violently suppressed by the Korean army. The White Ebook (2017) utilises visceral imagery and a fragmented construction to ponder the loss of life of the narrator’s new child sister. In Greek Classes (translated into English in 2023), a girl who has misplaced the power to talk learns historical Greek from a trainer who’s slowly dropping his imaginative and prescient. We Do Not Half (2025) recovers and reframes the historical past of the Jeju bloodbath by way of the lens of feminine relationships.
But, sure themes recur all through Han’s writing. Her novels give attention to the subjective and private experiences that come up from contexts of trauma, brutality and loss.
Yeong-Hye’s vegetarianism is a response to the violent physicality of her world. In a single scene her father, a veteran of the Vietnam Conflict, reads her dietary selection as a problem to the patriarchal management that he represents. Han has defined that she wrote the novel to ask if it was “potential for people to dwell a superbly harmless life in [a] violent world”.
Human Acts meditates on the homicide of 15-year-old Dong-ho by focusing every chapter on a unique individual impacted by his quick life. Han continuously makes use of second individual narration to immerse readers within the bleak and disoriented lives of her characters.
We Do Not Half anchors its exploration of historic trauma to the intertwined lives of three ladies, Kyungha, Inseon, and Inseon’s late mom. Inseon’s mom is traumatised by her reminiscences of the Jeju bloodbath, and the novel unfolds how these experiences form her relationship along with her daughter. Throughout her work, Han depicts the intimacy and trivia of human life within the wake of trauma.
Han can be a biographer of girls’s experiences
The White Ebook examines the poetry of life and loss of life that surrounds being pregnant and childbirth. In beautiful, evocative prose, Han explores the unsettling dimensions of mourning a sister whom the narrator by no means knew.
Han’s ladies are quietly cussed, they exert their questioning and company in ways in which won’t register inside western feminism. They have an inclination to bother patriarchal constructions by way of acts of negation and withdrawal. In Greek Classes, the unnamed narrator doesn’t “like taking over area” and has “no want to disseminate herself”. In
The Vegetarian, Yeong-Hye decides to separate herself from meat and finally humanity, a selection that’s met with violent reprisals from her husband, father, and brother-in-law.
The writer is a PhD candidate in English at Fordham College, New York. She works on postcolonial South Asia.
