By Joyce Lee and Ju-min Park
SEOUL (Reuters) – Han Kang, South Korea’s first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was slow to global acclaim, getting her first big international prize nine years after her best-known novel was published, and finally translated into English.
The long wait for the translation of “The Vegetarian”, which won the 2016 Man Booker International prize, seemed to prove the observation of Han’s father – that it was the kind of book “that goes straight into the drawer”.
Although the novel went on to be translated into dozens of languages, “The Vegetarian” had sold fewer than a million copies back home before Thursday’s Nobel announcement by the Swedish Academy, largely because of relatively low literature readership among South Koreans and a languishing publishing industry.
Han’s compatriots were making up for lost time on Friday, mobbing bookstores for her novels, poetry and short stories.
For some, Thursday’s surprise announcement – Han had not been on any of the major lists of likely Nobel winners – fuelled hope that the land of K-pop and “Squid Game” might get an injection of life into its literature. Despite a rich history, Korean literature is far less known abroad than Japanese or Chinese works.
“I grew up with Korean literature, which I feel very close to,” Han told an Academy official in her only comments since the award was announced. “I hope this news is nice for Korean literature readers and my friends, writers.”
Literary critic Oh Hyung-yup, a Korea University professor, said Han’s Nobel recognition was a win for the long-term effort to translate Korean literature for the global audience, who are already familiar with South Korea’s pop culture.
MASSACRES, ‘POETIC SENSIBILITY’
Han, 53, the 18th woman to win the literature prize, was born in Gwangju, where she lived until age 10, when her father, himself an esteemed writer domestically, moved the family to the capital Seoul.
She was not in Gwangju to witness the May 1980 massacre by the military of hundreds of students and unarmed civilians after a coup d’etat. But she explored the historical trauma of the crushed democratic uprising in her novel “Human Acts”.
The events carved a searing impression in her of the “conundrum” that people can be harrowingly violent but also risk their lives to help others, she said in 2021.
“When I try to talk about human beings, I think I have to get through Gwangju in May, and as always, there’s no way to get through it other than writing,” she said, referring to “Human Acts”.
Asked to describe Han as a writer in one sentence, her father, the novelist Han Seung-won, said: “She is a good young novelist who writes with poetic sensibility.”
Besides her prolific, award-winning father, who has penned novels often set in his coastal hometown, her brother is also a novelist.
PRAISE FROM K-POP STAR
After graduating from Yonsei University with a major in Korean literature, Han worked for a literary journal before her debut in 1993 with a collection of poems, followed by a collection of short stories.
Private but not reclusive, the soft-spoken Han became a constant presence on South Korea’s literary scene, publishing novels as well as short-story collections and children’s books.
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.
Published in French last year, the novel has won France’s Prix Medicis for foreign literature. Besides the Booker prize, Han has received Italy’s Premio Malaparte for “Human Acts” and Spain’s Archbishop Xoan de San Clemente Prize for “The Vegetarian.”
In a further sign her books are gaining wider appeal, K-Pop supergroup BTS member V said on social media on Thursday: “I read ‘Human Acts’ during military service… Congratulations!”
(Reporting by Joyce Lee and Ju-min Park; Writing by Jack Kim; Editing by Ed Davies and William Mallard)
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