Han Kang

Han Kang was born in Gwangju and moved with her family to Seoul only months before the 1980 massacre there, a near-miss that haunted her work for decades before she confronted it directly. Her father, Han Seung-won, was also a novelist, and she started as a poet before turning to fiction, studying Korean literature at Yonsei University.

The Vegetarian, in which a woman's refusal to eat meat unravels into her family's violence and her own wish to become a plant, won the International Booker Prize in 2016 with translator Deborah Smith. Human Acts returned her to Gwangju directly, narrating the massacre through its dead and its survivors, closing with the author's own testimony.

In 2024 she became the first Korean writer, and first Asian woman, to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited for prose that 'confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.'