The South Korean writer Han Kang (Gwanju, 1970) became the eighteenth woman to obtain the Nobel Prize in Literature and the first person originating from South Korea to be honored with this award granted by the Swedish Academy since 1901.
The career of the journalist, who resides in Seoul since he was nine years old, he began in 1993 with the publication of some poems in the Korean magazine Literature and Society. Two years later, in 1995, without abandoning the poetic halo that would accompany the rest of his writing, he published his first work in prose, titled Love of Yeosu.
He hasn’t stopped doing it since then, but it wasn’t until 2003 that this budding career began to take off in the literary circles premises with the publication of Your Cold Hands, work that not only already showed Kang’s clear interests in art, but also that thematic imprint based on his concerns: that concern for the human experience interceded by the experiences of the body, and how this is revealing when it is conceived. What life is like seen from a perspective with its sensitivity.
Four years later, the South Korean novelist, a declared devotee of the work of Jorge Luis Borges, public The Vegetarian, his opus magnum, where he delves into his obsessions through a woman who escapes the oppressive ideals of a society that is not willing to confront her discomfort and, therefore, takes her to the extreme of social punishment, where we are then part of an experience that, grasping the symbols, will allow us to question some dark places of the human mind.
Along with the aforementioned work, there are his Human Actsanother of his fundamental works, which takes us to his birthplace, specifically to a massacre that It took place in 1980 in the hands of the South Korean military.
In this book, where Han Kang makes use of testimonial literature, the voices of the victims are recovered through the deep and respectful style of the novelist who does not seek to put herself in the forefront, but only to unite those pieces that were scattered.
Blanco is, perhaps, the work that completes Kang’s perfect triangle. Here, as the poet Isabel Zapata says, “a personal mythology is proposed,” written from a pain that is divided into two fundamental events in the novelist’s life: the death of her older sister and the chronic headache that accompanies it. since his adolescence.
Vital interests complete the portrait of his work: silence and the transparent exhibition of “human fragility” that, erected from the poetic and experimental, as he pointed out, Anders Olsson, They make their literature a unique space that innovated the way we look at contemporary prose.
Finally, expand what the English writer Catherine Taylor points out in an article The Guardian and it is fundamental in these times: that this triumph means both Korean literature and independent publishers, since they opted to translate Han Kang’s work into Spanish — by Sun-me Yoon to publish The Vegetarian in Argentina in Bajo la Luna publishing house, in 2012—and into English—by Deborah Smith in 2015, for England, a translation with which they would later win the Booker Prize—directly from its original language, before major labels such as Penguin Random House.