Han Kang

Han Kang (Korean: 한강; born 27 November 1970) is a South Korean writer. From 2007 to 2018, she taught creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.[ Han 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. In 2024, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, a first for an Asian woman and for a Korean. Han Kang was born on 27 November 1970 in Gwangju, South Korea. According to her father, she is named for the Han River (Korean: 한강; RR: Hangang). Her family is noted for its literary background. Her father is novelist Han Seung-won. Her older brother, Han Dong-rim, is also a novelist, while her younger brother, Han Kang-in, is a novelist and cartoonist. At the age of nine, Han moved to Suyu-ri in Seoul, when her father quit his teaching job to become a full-time writer, four months before the Gwangju Uprising, a pro-democracy movement that ended in the military's massacre of students and civilians. She first learned about the massacre when she was 12, after discovering at home a secretly circulated memorial album of photographs taken by a German journalist, Jürgen Hinzpeter. This discovery deeply influenced her view on humanity and her literary works.