Korean · b. 1970
Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature and the 2016 International Booker Prize for "The Vegetarian," a novel about a woman who refuses to eat meat and the violence her family visits upon her. The South Korean author writes about bodies, trauma, and historical atrocity with lyric intensity. "Human Acts" addressed the Gwangju Uprising; "The White Book" mourned a sister who died in infancy. Kang's fiction insists that literature can bear witness to suffering.