The Third Edit: Han Kang, recipient of 2024 Literature Nobel, a writer who gets under the skin

At the property of 12, Han Kang recovered a concealed “book”, stashed successful a bookcase successful her location successful Seoul, its spine turned to the wall. It was an album, filled with photos from the 1980 massacre of pupil protestors successful Gwangju, an lawsuit that the young Han had nary cognition of until past and which, to this day, remains mostly shrouded successful soundlessness successful South Korea. The images of mutilated bodies “broke immoderate tender happening heavy wrong me”, she recalled years later, successful an interrogation to The Guardian. For the 51-year-old writer, the victor of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature — the archetypal Korean to triumph the honour — the find laid the foundations for a lifelong literate preoccupation with the body. It became, for her, not conscionable a tract of brutality, but of eventual resistance, raising questions astir what it means to beryllium quality and susceptible of large violence.

These concerns are astir evident successful her 2 best-known works. In The Vegetarian (2007), which won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, Han tells the communicative of a pistillate whose revulsion to meat, formed overnight arsenic a effect to unspeakable dreams, leads to maltreatment and exploitation, and her ain rejection of her body. Human Acts (2014) deals much straight with the Gwangju Uprising, an unsparing introspection of the carnage. What imbues her stories of alienated individuals and fragmented societies with a cosmopolitan humanity is simply a poetic strength that rises supra these themes of grief, trauma and horror.