Han Kang

Han Kang was born in Gwangju, in south-western Korea, the daughter of a novelist. The family moved to Seoul when she was nine, a few months before soldiers killed hundreds of protesters in her home city in May 1980. Her father later showed her a smuggled book of photographs of the massacre, and she has said the question of how people can be so cruel and so brave at once has been with her ever since.

She studied Korean literature, worked for a magazine and published her first poems in 1993 and her first story a year later. Her novels came slowly. The Vegetarian, about a woman who stops eating meat and stops fitting into her family, took three years; for part of that time pain in her hands and wrists meant she could not use a keyboard, so she typed by holding two ballpoint pens upside down and pressing the keys with them. Published in Korea in 2007, it was translated into English in 2015 and won the International Booker Prize the following year.

Human Acts, her novel about Gwangju, appeared in 2014 and earned her a place on a secret government blacklist of artists under President Park Geun-hye. She kept writing, sparingly, about the sea, snow and bereavement.

In October 2024 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. She declined to hold a press conference, saying she could not celebrate while wars were killing people every day.