On Oct. 10, the Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to Han Kang, the first Asian woman writer and the first Korean writer to win the prize. According to , an assistant professor of Korean literature and popular culture at the University of 91³Ō¹Ļ, Hanās win is moving for many, including for readers of the Korean diaspora.
āHan, whose writing career spans more than two decades, has irrevocably changed the contemporary landscape of Korean literature,ā Cho said. āWinning the prize or not winning it does not change this fact. Hanās grounded response to the prize, such as her refusal to hold a press conference, exhibits a courageous dedication to literary practice on her own terms.ā
Hanās writing demands āa commitment to witnessing strangeness, difference, violence and transcendence in the human experience,ā Cho noted, with the authorās lyrical prose marked by āsharp testimonial instincts, tending to entanglements between the personal and political.ā
āHanās work lingers at what has been silenced and unravels what has been normalized,ā she said. āHan has been received by many readers as a feminist writer due to her subversive portrayals of gendered and sexualized embodiment in her fictional works such as āThe Vegetarian,ā which begins with a corporate workerās description of his wife, whom he describes as passive and unremarkable. The novel is set into motion through the womanās refusal to eat meat and wear a bra, revealing fragmented glimpses into her surreal interiority consisting of violent dreams and memories.
āHanās other novels such as āHuman Acts,ā which confronts traumas of the May 1980 Gwangju uprising, and āGreek Lessons,ā which follows the relationship between a grieving woman and her Greek teacher, interrogate what it means to narrativize loss.ā