When it comes to Korean writers and the Nobel Prize for Literature, there was much expectation that Hwang Sok-yong, the marvelous storyteller of The Old Garden, would get the nod. Or the poet Ko Un, often picked out as a potential Nobel winner. This year, the Nobel jurors did indeed turn to South Korea, but they chose to award the prize to a woman, the novelist and poet Han Kang. At 53, she is the first South Korean winner of this esteemed prize. In so doing, the Swedish Academy honored a powerful work characterized by, in its words, “a double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental and physical torment with close connections to Eastern thinking.”
In 2023, Le Monde met Han for the French release of her 2021 novel I Do Not Bid Farewell. Just like her books, Han is a fine, precise novelist, with a poetic style that plunges readily into the fantastic, yet is sufficiently complex to conceal, beneath her praise of dreams and the imaginary, a relentless depiction of human cruelty. Torment, pain and the indelible traces of human violence were evident in the interview, from the very first sentence.
“I’ve always been curious about human nature, ever since I was a child,” she confided. “Maybe because it hurt me. You know, it’s like when you have a sore spot on your body and you can’t stop touching it, scratching it or just thinking about it.”
Barbarity came early in Han’s life. Daughter of writer Han Seung-won, little Han Kang was born in Gwangju, in the south of the country, on November 27, 1970. When she was 9, her family moved to Seoul, where she would later study literature at Yonsei University. This move took place exactly four months before the Gwangju Uprising (May 1980), a peaceful mobilization carried out by the student and trade union movement for democracy, in protest against the ruling military junta. The army’s response to the uprising was so ferocious that it remains synonymous with horror and bloodshed to this day.
Bodies slashed with bayonets
Han addressed the massacre, which also forms the backdrop to The Old Garden, in 2014’s Human Acts. Han discovered these events at the age of 12 when she stumbled across a hidden book at home. The photos of mutilated faces, bayoneted bodies and her bloodied hometown left an indelible mark on her. “Since then,” she said, “I’ve always tried to come to grips with the contradictory force that drives human beings to throw themselves onto a railroad line to save a child, or to murder their fellow creatures by the thousands. Whatever book I write, this violence comes through.”
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