Biography
Han Kang was born in Gwangju in 1970, grew up in Seoul from the age of eleven and graduated in Korean literature from Yonsei University in 1993. She began with poetry and soon became known as a prose writer: in 1994 one of her stories won the literary prize of the newspaper Seoul Shinmun, and in 2005 she received the Yi Sang Literary Award. From 2007 to 2018 she taught creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. Her novel “The Vegetarian” (2007) won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 in Deborah Smith’s English translation and brought her international recognition. Further novels include “Human Acts” (2014), about the suppression of the Gwangju Uprising of 1980, and “We Do Not Part” (2021), about the Jeju massacre; in German her books are translated by Ki-Hyang Lee and published by Aufbau Verlag. In 2024 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, honoured for poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and lays bare the fragility of human life.
On Stagelog
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