Han Kang's Nobel spurs hope of global recognition for Korean literature

By Joyce Lee and Ju-min Park

SEOUL (Reuters) - Han Kang, South Korea's first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was slow to secure global acclaim, getting her first big international prize nine years after her best-known novel was published, once it had finally been translated into English.

The long wait for the translation of "The Vegetarian", which won the 2016 Man Booker International prize, seemed to prove the observation of Han's father, himself an award-winning novelist, that it was the kind of book that "goes straight into the drawer".

Although the novel went on to be translated into dozens of languages, "The Vegetarian" had sold fewer than a million copies back home before Thursday's announcement by the Swedish Academy, largely because of relatively low readership of literature among South Koreans and a languishing publishing industry.

Han's compatriots were making up for lost time on Friday, mobbing bookstores for her novels, poetry and short stories.

For some, Thursday's surprise announcement - Han had not been on any of the major lists of likely Nobel winners - fuelled hope that literature might get an injection of life in the land of K-pop and "Squid Game". Despite a rich history, Korean literature is far less known abroad than Japanese or Chinese works.

"I grew up with Korean literature, which I feel very close to," Han told an Academy official after the award was announced. "I hope this news is nice for Korean literature readers and my friends, writers."

HAN KANG'S WORKS EXPLORE RECENT KOREAN HISTORY

Literary critic Oh Hyung-yup, a professor at Korea University, said Han's award was a win for long-standing efforts to translate Korean literature for a global audience already familiar with South Korea's buoyant pop culture. 

Han, 53, the 18th woman to win the Literature Prize, was born in Gwangju, where she lived until age 10, when her father, Han Seung-won, moved the family to the capital Seoul.

She was not in Gwangju to witness the massacre of hundreds of students and unarmed civilians by the military in May 1980, after a coup d'etat. But she explored the historical trauma of the crushed democratic uprising in her novel "Human Acts".

The events carved a searing impression in her of the "conundrum" that people can be harrowingly violent but also risk their lives to help others, she said in 2021.

"When I try to talk about human beings, I think I have to get through Gwangju in May and, as always, there's no way to get through it other than writing," she said.

Asked to describe Han as a writer in one sentence, her father said: "She is a good young novelist who writes with poetic sensibility." 

Besides her father, a prolific writer whose novels are often set in his coastal hometown, her brother is also a novelist. 

PRAISE FOR HAN KANG FROM K-POP STAR

After graduating from Yonsei University with a major in Korean literature, Han worked for a literary journal before making her debut in 1993 with a collection of poems, followed by a collection of short stories. 

Private but not reclusive, the soft-spoken Han became a constant presence on South Korea's literary scene, publishing novels as well as short-story collections and children's books.

"It also surprised me that warm congratulations came like huge waves throughout the day. I am deeply grateful," Han said in a statement issued late on Friday by her publisher, Changbi.

A representative said she did not plan to hold a press conference.

Han's latest novel, "We Do Not Part," published in Korean in 2021 and due out in English next year, is a chronicle of the pain and torment that followed another massacre - one carried out in the late 1940s to early 1950s in the name of rooting out communists on Jeju island. 

Published in French last year, it won France's Prix Medicis for foreign literature. Besides the Booker prize, Han has received Italy's Premio Malaparte for "Human Acts" and Spain's Archbishop Xoan de San Clemente Prize for "The Vegetarian".

In a further sign that her books are gaining wider appeal, K-Pop supergroup BTS member V posted on Thursday: "I read 'Human Acts' during military service ... Congratulations!" 

(Reporting by Joyce Lee and Ju-min Park; Writing by Jack Kim; Editing by Ed Davies, William Mallard and Kevin Liffey)