Major bookstores in South Korea are experiencing a surge in sales of all of Han Kang’s works following the announcement of her Nobel Prize in literature.
Best known for her surreal novel “The Vegetarian,” Han won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first Asian female laureate as well as the first South Korean author to receive the honour.
Her other books including Human Acts, The White Book, Greek Lessons, I Put the Evening in the Drawer, The Vegetarian (Revised Edition), Human Acts (E-book), and The Essentials: Han Kang are also flying off the shelves.
Her latest novel, “We Do Not Part,” has seen a staggering 7,500-fold increase in sales due to a sudden increase in demand.
The 53-year-old author rose to international prominence for her novel The Vegetarian, which became the first Korean language novel to win the International Booker Prize for fiction in 2016.
She won the Korean Novel Award for Baby Buddha in 1999, the 2000 Today’s Young Artist Award from the Korean Ministry of Culture, 2005 Yi Sang Literary Award for Mongolian Mark and Dongri Literary Award for The Wind is Blowing in 2010.
She also won the Manhae Literary Award for Human Acts in 2014, Hwang Sun-won Literary Award for While One Snowflake Melts in 2015, Malaparte Prize for the Italian translation of Human Acts in 2017, and Kim Yu-jeong Literary Award for Farewell in 2018.
Han was also awarded San Clemente Literary Prize for The Vegetarian in 2019.
Han’s novel We Do Not Part was published in 2021. It tells the story of a writer researching the 1948–49 Jeju uprising and its impact on her friend’s family. The French translation of the novel won the Prix Médicis Étranger in 2023.
In 2024, Han was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature by the Swedish Academy for her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.
Her literary career began when five of her poems, including “Winter in Seoul“, were featured in the Winter 1993 issue of the quarterly Literature and Society. She made her fiction debut the next year with her short story “The Scarlet Anchor”.
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As of Monday, the translations of “The Vegetarian” and “We Do Not Part” topped Amazon’s bestseller lists.
