It was only a question of time before South Korean literature emerged on the world stage. On Thursday Han Kang, author of the cult novel The Vegetarian, became the first South Korean writer to be awarded the Nobel prize for literature. This is the latest triumph of hallyu – the South Korean wave – that has been scoring firsts across all cultural forms with the phenomenal success of pop bands like BTS; the 2020 Oscar-winning satire Parasite (the first film not in the English language to take the top prize); TV sensations like Squid Game (Netflix’s most watched show ever), and Pachinko, an adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s bestselling novel, currently in its second series. Now K-lit joins K-pop, K-drama and K-beauty. South Korea is a cultural powerhouse – with a Nobel laureate to prove it.
After a century of colonialism, division, dictatorship and struggle to democracy, South Korean writers have powerful, often unheard, stories to tell. South Korean writing was the focus of the 2014 London Book Fair, but it was Han (not among the 10 authors invited over) whose work captured the outside world’s imagination a couple of years later.
Strange, in a truly Kafkaesque sense, disquieting and subversive, Han’s style is both spare and lyrical. She started out as a poet. Her subject is human violence and the possibility, or impossibility, of understanding. Like Parasite or Squid Game, which both grimly reflect the costs and failures of South Korean-style capitalism, her work does not present a flattering picture of her country. She writes about trauma, both national and personal, and even her most intimate novels are deeply rooted in Korean history.
Since the English translation of The Vegetarian in 2015, by Deborah Smith, Han’s reputation and readership have grown steadily. The following year, she became the first South Korean writer to be nominated for the International Booker prize, which she went on to win. Her triumph provoked an unlikely controversy about mistranslation and language after a savage review of The Vegetarian in The New York Review of Books.
The same year, Human Acts, about the aftermath of the 1980 massacre of student protesters in the South Korean city of Gwangju, where Han was born, was also published in English. Two more novels, The White Book and Greek Lessons, followed.
But she was an outsider for the Nobel. At 53, Han is the second youngest laureate – after Rudyard Kipling at 41. She does not have the volume of work or stature of a writer such as Margaret Atwood, a perennial favourite for the prize. But, as only the 18th female laureate and like her predecessor, the French writer Annie Ernaux, her work succeeds in being both culturally specific and universal. The Vegetarian, about a woman who refuses to eat in the belief that she has transformed into a plant, and is force-fed by her father, has been widely read as a parable of South Korean patriarchal society. Now translated into 20 languages, its portrait of violation and oppression has spoken to women all over the globe.
In recent years, more works of South Korean writers and poets – such as Kim Hyesoon - have been translated and published internationally. In making Han the 2024 Nobel laureate, the Swedish Academy has reminded us that there is a world of literature outside the west. Her work’s strangeness cannot neatly be explained. She is a bold and revelatory choice.
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