What you should know about Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature

It’s hard to find anyone here who would have expected Han Kang to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the world’s highest literary honor, in 2024.

Although the South Korean writer has won a number of other prestigious international awards and is widely read here, she is 53 years old and the prize is traditionally given to writers at the end of their careers.

“I thought she might win it one day, but I didn’t expect it to happen so soon,” said Jeong Kwa-ri, a literary critic and former professor of Korean literature at Yonsei University, Hans Alma Mater. “Most South Korean writers considered top contenders are in their 70s and 80s.”

Honored last week by the Swedish Academy “for her intense poetic prose that grapples with historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life,” Han is the first Asian woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in its 123-year history, and the second South Korean woman to win the Nobel Prize. Then-President Kim Dae-jung received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 for his diplomacy with North Korea.

Han kept a low profile after the victory, reportedly refusing a celebration planned by her father, citing the wars still raging Gaza And Ukraine. But the rest of the country is affected by “Han Kang Syndrome.”

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As of Tuesday, the country’s booksellers have reported more than 800,000 sales of Han’s works and expect to reach the 1 million mark by the end of the week. Stores struggling with long queues are selling out quickly and printers are working around the clock to produce more.

Han, who was born in the city of Gwangju in 1970, comes from a literary family. Her father is Han Sung-won, a famous writer who has happily noted that his daughter’s stature has dwarfed his own.

“Before, Han Kang was known as the daughter of Han Sung-won, but now I have become Han Sung-won, the father of Han Kang,” he said in a 2016 interview.

Many of Han’s novels are intimate portraits of violence in everyday life, encompassing both South Korea’s long history of authoritarian rule feminist struggles the present.

One of her most famous works in South Korea is “Human acts” a novel about the Chun Doo-hwan the massacre of civilians by the military dictatorship in 1980 following pro-democracy protests in the city of Gwangju.

The public debate over the massacre has long troubled South Korean conservatives. At times they tried to downplay the government’s role or spread conspiracy theories that the protests were an act of North Korean deception.

Under the former president’s conservative government Park Geun-hyeHan, the daughter of another military dictator, was blacklisted in 2014, barring her from government support like other creatives deemed ideologically undesirable.

Told from multiple perspectives, “Human Acts” is inspired by real-life characters, including Moon Jae-hak, a high school student who was shot by junta troops stationed in Gwangju.

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“I was so happy that I thought my heart would stop,” Kim Kil-ja, Moon’s mother, said of Hans Nobel in an interview with local media. “Your book 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 addresses a massacre of civilians carried out by the South Korean government on Jeju Island in 1948, a time of anti-communist paranoia. The English translation of the novel, which won France’s Prix Médicis last year, is scheduled to be published in January 2025.

But Hans’ most famous – and infamous – work is “The Vegetarian” a dark, surreal story about a woman who goes mad after vowing to give up meat. Hailed as a parable about female resistance to 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 put the book at the center of a heated debate about literary translations. Critics said the award-winning English translation by Smith, who had begun learning Korean only a few years earlier, not only made fundamental errors – such as confusing the Korean word for “foot” with “arm” – but also broadened the text Furthermore, acceptable translation parameters are changed.

“Translations of Korean literature have long suffered from many obstacles, and ‘pure’ translations have not been successful,” said Jeong, the literary critic.

The question has long plagued the country’s literary scene, which has watched South Korea’s film and television industry produce global hits like “Parasite” and “Parasite.” “Squid Game” At the same time, I wonder why South Korean books have failed to attract the same level of global interest.

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“As a result, there is an increasing tendency for translations to overlook distortions of the original text and prefer to adapt to the tastes of foreign readers,” Jeong said. “’The Vegetarian’ is a prime example of this.”

Write Writing for The Times in 2016, Charse Yun, a Korean-American literary translator, acknowledged Smith’s “exquisite” sentences but said the translation had “transformed into a ‘new creation.'”

“It’s hard for me to find an appropriate analogy, but imagine the sleek, contemporary style of Raymond Carver, topped with the sophisticated diction of Charles Dickens,” he wrote.

Smith, who has translated two of Hans’ other books, defended her work in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2018, arguing that given the differences between two languages, “there can be no such thing as a translation.” ,creative’.”

For many critics, the question of translation is still open. But for better or worse, Han’s most recent and most prestigious award has now laid the foundation for the global success of Korean literature.

Despite his doubts about Smith’s translation, Yun today sees many reasons to be optimistic.

“The field opened up tremendously and more people had access to Korean literature,” Yun said of Han’s global rise.

“I’m just happy for my former students and other talented translators out there who now have the opportunity to bring other Korean voices into the field.”

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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.