From the periphery to the center

The elevation of Korean literature must also thank the translators who poetically relayed the uniqueness in the writer’s style and capture the subtleties of emotion and the Korean language.

Author Han Kang has reached the peak of the literary world by winning this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. She became the second Korean to win a Nobel Prize after President Kim Dae-jung, who won the Peace Prize in 2000, and the first Asian woman awarded in the category.

Korean literature has evolved for more than a century since the milestone novel “Mujeong [The Heartless]” by Yi Kwang-su, but was undiscovered by global audiences. Although many writers were deemed worthy of receiving the universal honor of literary greatness, they all fell short. Poet Go Eun was a regular on the candidate list of the Swedish Academy since the early 2000s, but was never a finalist. We had to watch with envy when the Nobel Prize went to Japanese writers Yasunari Kawabata in 1968 and Kenzaburo Oe in 1994 and most recently Mo Yan of China in 2012. Han completed the East Asian triangle with Korea’s first win.

Born to a family of writers, including her father and novelist Han Seung-won, Han Kang debuted as a poet in 1993 and as a fiction writer in the following year with a collection of short stories. Her work was devoted to exploring the inner scars left by traumatic experiences and violence through lyrical prose. Born in Gwangju in 1970, her father told her tragic stories from the civilian uprising which happened in her birthplace in 1980. That left a lasting impact on her thoughts and the narratives in her writings.

“The Vegetarian,” which brought her work to the global spotlight through the Booker International Prize in 2016, follows a woman who refuses to eat meat after having violent dreams about animal slaughter through a metaphorical journey on the themes of social conformity and violence. “Human Acts” looks back on the Gwangju uprising in 1980, and her latest work “We Do Not Part” revisits another dark chapter in Korean history — the massacres on Jeju Island in the late 1940s. The Royal Swedish Academy commended her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life” for its choice of the literary awardee this year.

The elevation of Korean literature must also thank the translators who poetically relayed the uniqueness in the writer’s style and capture the subtleties of emotion and the Korean language. British translator Deborah Smith was behind Han’s rise and self-studied Korean for six years before tackling “The Vegetarian.” Smith co-shared the Booker International Prize in 2016.

Government patronage to promote Korean literature to the global stage has been meager. A 2023 bill to open a graduate degree to cultivate foreign translators of Korean literature was automatically scrapped amid little attention. The latest feat must bring more attention to the field.