Poetic South Korean rebel wins Nobel

It is the case with many of the Nobel Prize winners, in whatever field, that they are not so well known in the public arena, and they gain fame after they become Nobel laureates. So, it should not come as a surprise that South Korean writer Han Kang is not so well known despite the fact that she had won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for her 2007 novel, ‘The Vegetarian’, translated into English by Deborah Smith in 2015.

Her latest novel, “We Do Not Part”, won the prix Medici Etranger in 2023. The novel’s English translation will be out in 2025.  She is sure to become better known after winning the Nobel on Thursday. It would be unfair to blame the Nobel Committee for choosing little known writers from countries which are not on the world literary map for various reasons.

It is indeed the task of committees like the Nobel and other prize juries to discover new writers and bring them to the attention of the larger public. And more importantly, it is their obligation to honour good and great writing whether it is famous or not.

Han made her literary debut with five poems in 1993 and she won a literary award for her short story in 1995. In 1998 she attended the University of Iowa International Writing Program for three months, supported by the Arts Council Korea. Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel Committee, spoke of her “empathy for vulnerable, often female, lives is palpable, and reinforced by her metaphysically charged prose.” And he also observed, “She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in a poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose.”

It is laudable on the part of the Nobel Prize Committee for Literature that it makes an attempt to choose from writers across the world through translations. The Swedish committee might have better access to the original writing in European languages, but it has to depend on translations from other places like Asia into one of the European languages.

For example, the Egyptian novelist, Naguib Mahfooz, who had won the Nobel for Literature in 1988, became known to the world through translations. The world has shrunk into a smaller place because of technology, but the cultural distances remain. And it is only through translation of literary works from one language into another that bridges are built between people and cultures.

It is also to be remembered that writers are cultural dissidents. Han seems to be a gentle rebel because in her novels she recounts painful political events from a personal angle. Her 2014 novel, “The Human Acts” is about the 1980 Gwangju massacre which was brutally suppressed by the military. The novel is described as telling the story of the massacre “by narrating how sufferings from this historical event came to be written into the everyday life and the bodies of the victims, witnesses and survivors, exploring this from the perspective of six people directly and indirectly impacted by the massacre.”

Thanks to the Nobel Prize for Literature given to Han Kang, we will get to read her sensitive novels and related to the intimate sufferings of the people of her country, which have a universal element, and at the same time the uniquely Korean touch. It is also a reminder that we need more translations of literatures of different peoples of the world, and the need is urgent in a world riven with conflict and misunderstanding. And more importantly with Han Kang, it is the woman’s voice that stands out, like in the case of French writer Annie Ernaux, who won the Nobel for Literature in 2022.