Han Kang

Han Kang
Han Kang at SIBF 2014
Born	(1970-11-27) November 27, 1970 (age 46) Gwangju, South Korea
Occupation	Writer
Language	Korean
Nationality	South Korean
Alma mater	Yonsei University
Genre	Fiction
Notable works	The Vegetarian
Notable awards	Man Booker International Prize 2016 Yi Sang Literary Award 2005

Han Kang (Hangul: 한강; born November 27, 1970) is a South Korean writer. She won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction in 2016 for The Vegetarian, a novel which deals with a woman’s decision to stop eating meat and its devastating consequences. The novel is also one of the first of her books to be translated into English.

Han Kang is the daughter of novelist Han Seung-won. She was born in Gwangju and at the age of 10, moved to Suyuri (of which she speaks affectionately in her novel Greek Lessons) in Seoul. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. Her brother Han Dong Rim is also a writer. She began her writing career when one of her poems was featured in the winter issue of the quarterly Literature and Society. She made her official literary debut in the following year when her short story "The Scarlet Anchor" was the winning entry in the daily Seoul Shinmun spring literary contest. Since then, she has gone on to win the Yi Sang Literary Prize (2005), Today's Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. As of summer 2013, Han teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts while writing stories and novels and is currently working on her sixth novel.

Han's debut work, A Convict's Love, was published in 1995 and attracted attention because it was precisely and tightly narrated. Han wrote The Vegetarian, and its sister-work, Mongolian Mark by hand, as overuse of the computer keyboard had damaged her wrist. It has been reported that in her college years Kang became obsessed with a line of poetry from Yi Sang: "I believe that humans should be plants." and that Kang interpreted this to be a defensive stance against the violence of the colonial period and took this as an inspiration to write her most successful work, The Vegetarian. The Vegetarian was Kang's first novel translated into English, though Kang had already attracted worldwide attention by the time Deborah Smith translated the novel. The translated work won the Man Booker International Prize 2016 for them both. She is the first Korean to be nominated for the award. The work was also chosen as one of "The 10 Best Books of 2016" from NYTimes Book Review.