This year’s Nobel laureate in literature, Han Kang, “has a unique ability to draw attention to the connection between the body and the soul, life and death,” said Anders Olsson, chairman of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel committee. Several of her books have been published in Poland, including: “The Vegetarian”, “White Elegy” and “The Boy Is Coming”.
Journalists gathered on Thursday in the Old Exchange Hall, the seat of the Swedish Academy, were surprised by the unexpected verdict. Immediately after the announcement that this year’s Nobel Prize winner was the South Korean writer and poet Han Kang, there was silence among the audience.
Although it was previously speculated that this year’s Nobel Prize might go to a woman and that it would not be a creator from Western culture, 53-year-old Han Kang was not mentioned among the favorites. She is the first South Korean writer to receive the Nobel Prize.
An international breakthrough in her career was the book “Wegetarianka” from 2007, in which she described the brutal consequences of the decision of the novel’s heroine, who decides at all costs not to adapt to the norm accepted by the majority and stops eating meat.
“Her sensitivity to the disadvantaged – often women – can be strongly felt in this prose full of metaphors. In the novel +Greek Lessons+ from 2011, a tender love blossoms between a woman who has lost the ability to speak and a teacher of ancient Greek who is losing his sight. The book is a complete a beautiful meditation on loss, intimacy and the nature of language itself,” said Anders Olsson, chairman of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel committee.
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Han Kang was born in 1970 in Gwangju. She lived in Seoul from the age of ten, where she moved with her family. She started writing when she was 14. She was the daughter of a writer and grew up in a house full of books. She studied Korean Philology at Yonsei University. She made her debut as a poet, publishing five poems, including “Winter in Seoul”. She published her first collection of short stories titled “Yeosu” in 1995. Her works include the short story collections “Fruits of My Woman” (2000), “Fire Salamander” (2012); novels: “Black Deer” (Black Deer, 1998), “Your Cold Hands” (2002), “The Vegetarian” (2007), “Breath Fighting” (2010) and “Greek Lesson” ( Greek Lessons, 2011), “Here Comes a Boy” (Human Acts) (2014), “The White Book” (2016), “Europa” (2019). Several of her books have been published in Poland, translated by Justyna Najbar-Miller: “Wegetarianka” (published by Kwiaty Orientu), “The Boy is Coming” (published by WAB 2020), “Biała elegia” (published by WAB 2022) and “I Don’t Say Goodbye” ” (published by WAB 2024).
The Nobel Prize winner’s most famous novel, “The Vegetarian”, is a story about the fight for one’s own identity in Korean, patriarchal society. A young married woman gives up eating meat, thus breaking away from the norms and social customs that are strictly observed in her country. +Her vegetarianism meets with opposition from her relatives, and the order of her everyday life is disrupted. The metamorphosis of a woman’s body and mind will take her to unknown areas. Something else will also happen – giving up eating meat is only the beginning of a much deeper transformation. For “The Vegetarian”, the writer received the International Booker in 2016.
In an interview for “Gazeta Wyborcza”, the writer talked about the heroine of the novel: “Jong-hye is undergoing a metamorphosis. He stops eating meat, gradually excludes himself from his previous life, wants to become a tree. He comes to the conclusion that he can no longer be a human, belong to of this race. But even in this situation, or perhaps especially at such a moment, she experiences humiliation and contempt, misunderstanding from her loved ones who are trying to +repair her+ at all costs. “She makes sure once again that she has made the right decision, refusing to blindly follow the crowd, to live on terms that are not her own. She decides to save herself through self-destruction and suffering, deconstructing her own body, because this is the only way to liberation and salvation,” she said.
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Han Kang also said that the International Booker Prize for “The Vegetarian” coincided with the outbreak of the second wave of feminism in South Korea – nearly three decades after the first. “The direct cause was a misogynistic murder committed in Seoul. It was a flashpoint, there were street protests, women finally spoke up. And to this day, fortunately, they have not been silenced. The process of reforms began, primarily in the field of the judiciary, which resulted in granting us greater protection,” the writer said.
“White Elegy”, which was a finalist for the International Man Booker Prize in 2018 (it was published in Poland in 2022), is the author’s most personal book. Han Kang wrote most of the novel during her winter stay in Warsaw. She was invited to Poland by Justyna Najbar-Miller, a Polish translator, as part of the residency program organized by the University of Warsaw.
“Those were four wonderful months in 2014. Living in Warsaw, working, getting to know the city, I thought a lot about my older sister, who lived for only two hours. In the family home, my mother kept talking about the little child who had passed away so suddenly, about the girl. with beautiful eyes. In a sense, I grew up in the shadow of my deceased sister, my mother didn’t let me forget about her, she only shared her memories with me, even though I had two brothers. I didn’t intend to write about it at all, but when I landed in Warsaw, all of them the memories came back to life. I was walking around the city, where I saw traces of bullets and old foundations. I knew that it had risen from the dead. And suddenly I began to imagine a person with whom the same thing was happening, suddenly coming back to life her presence. It was my sister. Thoughts were swirling in my head. What if she hadn’t died? Would I be here instead of her? Because if she hadn’t passed away, I certainly wouldn’t have existed They would decide to have another child,” said the writer in an interview for “Gazeta Wyborcza”.
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“The Boy is Coming” (the book was published in Poland in 2016) is a novel set in history. Its hero is Tongho, a teenage boy who dies from soldier bullets despite raising his hands. “He begins the story of the ten-day massacre of 1980 in Gwangju, South Korea. In his quiet, very poetic novel, Han Kang paints a universal and timeless picture of violence that – seemingly episodic – leaves its mark on people forever,” writes the publisher.
In January this year, WAB published the Nobel Prize winner’s latest book – “I Don’t Say Goodbye”. “The story takes place in the shadow of the massacre that took place in the late 1940s on the South Korean island of Jeju, in which tens of thousands of people died, including children and the elderly. They were accused of collaboration and shot (…). The characters the stories bear within them the tragedy that befell their relatives (…). Han Kang shows not only the power that the past exercises over the present, but also the efforts to bring back to light what had been pushed into darkness and collective oblivion. into the light of day, and the trauma will turn into an artistic project,” said Anders Olsson, secretary of the Swedish Academy, about this novel.
In “I Don’t Say Goodbye”, Han Kang describes not only historical events, but also presents a moving portrait of three women and the impact that the violence and loss they experienced had on them. Above all, it raises important questions about collective memory and historical responsibility.
“I remember that a few years ago, when someone asked me what I would write my next novel about, I replied that I hoped it would be a novel about love. I have not changed my mind. I hope it is a novel about love without borders,” she said about novel by the writer herself.
The secretary of the Swedish Academy, Mats Malm, said he spoke with the laureate by phone. “It seemed that I called in the middle of an ordinary day – the writer had just finished dinner with her son. She was completely unprepared for this news, but we started discussing the details of her visit to Stockholm in December.”
Author: Agata Szwedowicz
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