한 강 Han Kang was born in 1970 in the South Korean city of Gwangju before, at the age of nine, moving with her family to Seoul.

In the novel 소년이 온다 (2014; ‘Human Acts’, 2016), Han Kang employs as her political foundation a historical event that took place in Gwangju, where she grew up and where hundreds of students and unarmed civilians were murdered during a massacre carried out by the South Korean military in 1980. In seeking to give voice to the victims of history, the book confronts this episode with brutal actualisation and, in so doing, approaches the genre of witness literature. Han Kang’s style, as visionary as it is succinct, nevertheless deviates from our expectations of that genre, and it is a particular expedient of hers to permit the souls of the dead to be separated from their bodies, thus allowing them to witness their own annihilation. In certain moments, at the sight of the unidentifiable corpses that cannot be buried, the text harks back to the basic motif of Sophocles’s ‘Antigone’.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to the South Korean author Han Kang “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

Learn more about her literature: https://bit.ly/3Y0TL3o