Human Acts: Han Kang receives the Nobel Prize in Literature

The media frenzy in the lead-up to the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature each year, with groundless speculation on likely winners accompanied by breathless reporting of bookies’ odds, unconsciously skewers the practices of the “literary elite”: a fictional apparatus that only serves the purposes of those who do not read or write.

The decision to award the 2024 prize to Korean novelist 한강 (Han Kang) demonstrates, for me at least, that the Committee values bravery and a commitment to ideals. Her work is extremely difficult to read: not in terms of its “readability”, but rather the devastating way in which she writes about what people are capable of doing to each other.

Han Kang is probably best known to English readers for 채식주의자 (The Vegetarian), a short but outlandish novel that mines the depths of human suffering. Beginning with a woman’s decision to stop eating meat, the narrative evolves, through changing perspectives, into a terrifying portrait of violence and trauma in Korean society.

As far as I’m concerned, however, her 2016 novel 소년이 온다 (Human Acts) illustrates just why Han Kang is so deserving of the Nobel Prize. A retelling of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising from the point of view of (sometimes murdered) civilians, the book is an astonishing document of political violence that is both shocking and utterly moving.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading and engaging with Korean literature for so long that the awarding of the prize to Han Kang means so much to me personally. In 2018 I travelled to the Göteborg Book Fair to hear her speak about the process of writing Human Acts. It got to the point, she said, where the book was writing her.

Göteborg Book Fair 2019: Hanguk style

Last Thursday, succumbing to the hype, I posted my own breathless FB status update one second after the Nobel Committee made its announcement. A few minutes later, Kim Hyung-seok, who I first met in 2011 during a Cordite Poetry Review tour of Korea, commented on my post that Han Kang had been in attendance during one of our performances in Seoul, something I didn’t know at the time.

HAN KANG YES@!@@

– My Facebook status update on Thursday 10 October 2024 LOL

We’d been in Seoul to meet with Korean poets and to launch Cordite’s 韓 – 濠 (Oz-Ko) issue, a bilingual selection of Australian and Korean works which (for me, personally) was the high point of my time as the journal’s editor. I have to admit, however, that I cringe a little at the idea of Han Kang watching me rant about my idea for an all-purpose PC방 or “Multibang”.

Sparrow dabang (참새 다방)

In the end, I missed a chance to get Han Kang’s autograph at the Göteborg Book Fair as she had left by the time I could purchase one of her books. In a similar vein, I can only hope that Han Kang had departed the Seoul Art Space in Yeonhui-dong by the time I “performed” that night. Is this selfish? Just another writer trying to make another writer’s success all about me?

Over the past few days, all of my social feeds have been flooded with AI-generated posts about Han Kang and her literary oeuvre. It’s a sign of the crisis of content we currently endure but also a reminder to speak, type, write, read and listen. It’s not about me, after all, but about all of us, all of the time. Read Han Kang. Read a book, any book. Write your own post.

Crossposted on Facebook.