The nine-year-old Han Kang had left Gwangju four months before the massacre, when her family moved to Seoul; the facts about what happened were then kept from her until, aged 12, she found a memorial book of photographs, curated by foreign journalists, the copy hidden high in her father’s bookcase. “I remember the moment when my gaze fell upon the mutilated face of a young woman, her features slashed through with a bayonet,” she later wrote. “Silently, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke.”
A mixture of survivor’s guilt and a horror at mankind’s capacity for inhumanity left Han deeply affected. Fearful of the unpredictability of humans, she became happiest seeking solace and enlightenment in books, and in due course, she became a writer herself. Human cruelty has always been at the heart of her fiction. As she put it in an interview with The Independent last year, she cares about “how far humanity can go and still be human… it’s a conundrum, a fundamental question within me, so it comes out in whatever I write.”
Her 2007 novel The Vegetarian was her breakthrough in the Anglophone world. Translated by the young Briton Deborah Smith, it appeared in English in 2015 and won the International Booker Prize. It’s the story of Yeong-hye, a woman who becomes alienated from her family and society when she gives up eating meat. Han has described it in fabular terms: “This novel deals with human violence and the (im)possibility of refusing it… Yeong-hye desperately refuses meat to reject human brutality.”