Han Kang, the South Korean author best known for her surreal, subversive novel, “The Vegetarian,” was awarded the Nobel Prize in literatureon Thursday — the first writer from her country to receive the award. Here are the 10 facts about the author:
1. The honor is “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
2. “The Vegetarian,” published in Korea in 2007, won the 2016 International Booker Prize after it was translated into English.
3. Han, 53, was born in 1970 in Gwangju, South Korea. Her father was also a novelist, but much less successful.
4 When Han was 9, her family moved to Seoul just months before the Gwangju uprising, when government troops fired on crowds of pro-democracy protesters, killing hundreds. In her 2014 novel “Human Acts,” a writer observes a police raid on a group of activists.
5 Han studied literature at Yonsei University in Korea, and her first published works were poems. Her debut novel, “Black Deer,” which came out in 1998, was a mystery about a missing woman. Han said it was around that time that she developed the idea for a short story about a woman who becomes a plant, which she eventually developed into “The Vegetarian.”
6 Following her debut, Han went on to write seven more novels, as well as several novellas and collections of essays and short stories. Among her other novels are “The White Book".
7. Han’s work is now celebrated in South Korea, but that took some time, she said, and some of her books were initially greeted with bafflement. “The Vegetarian” was received as “very extreme and bizarre,” Han said. Deborah Smith translated “The Vegetarian” and sold it to a British publisher based on the first 10 pages.
8 Although relatively young for a Nobel laureate, Han is far older than Rudyard Kipling was when he accepted the 1907 award at 41. Han is the 18th woman to win the Nobel in literature, which has been awarded to 120 writers since 1901.
9. Two of her books have been made into films; "The Vegetarian" in 2009, directed by Lim Woo-Seong, and 2011's "Scars", by the same director.
10. Her latest novel, "We Do Not Part," published in Korean in 2021 and due out in English next year, is a chronicle of the pain and torment that followed another massacre - one in the late 1940s to early 1950s carried out in the name of rooting out communists on Jeju island.
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