Han Kang

Han Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea, and grew up in Seoul. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University and has taught creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.

In 1993, Kang made her literary debut by publishing five poems in Munhak-gwa-sahoe (Literature and Society), and her debut novel Black Deer came out in 1998. Her third novel, The Vegetarian, published in Korean in 2007 and in English translation in 2015 won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, becoming a perennial bestseller and rocketing her to international fame. Kang has published several short story and essay collections and her other novels include Human Acts (2016), the autobiographical The White Book (2017) and Greek Lessons (2023). Her most recent novel We Do Not Part has won two international literary prizes – the Medicis Prize in 2023 and the Émile Guimet Prize in 2024 – and is published in English translation in 2025.

Han Kang has won several literary awards both in South Korea and internationally, and in October 2024, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for ‘her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life’.