Since last Thursday, when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature, South Korean writer Han Kang‘s books have sold over a million copies at home. With reference to booksellers, the local agency Jonhap reported about it, according to which the victory caused a fever among readers. The award-winning author’s prose also quickly disappears from libraries and second-hand bookshops.
As of last Thursday, bookstore chains Kyobo, Aladin and Yes24 have sold over 1.03 million Han Kang books in print and tens of thousands more in electronic format. “They are selling at an unprecedented rate. We don’t remember anything like this,” says Kim Hyun-jung, a spokesman for the country’s largest book seller, Kyobo.
His top ten best-selling titles were already completely occupied by Han Kang titles last week. When people bought them all, all that remained were English translations and decorations congratulating the author on her success. Disappointed visitors at least took selfies in front of them, AFP reports.
At another Aladdin chain, sales of Han Kang books increased by 1,200 percent year-on-year. “I don’t remember such an onslaught since 2006, when I started working here,” says an Aladin employee. According to him, of the author’s novels, the greatest interest is in The Vegetarian, Where the Grass Blooms and I’m Not Saying Goodbye Forever.
Local media reports that because of the high demand, printers worked over the weekend to produce reprints in time. After Han Kang was announced as the winner of the prestigious award, tens of thousands of South Koreans started ordering her books online as well. As a result, the websites of publishing houses, bookshops and antiquarian bookshops have repeatedly crashed because they cannot meet the demand. Han Kang’s prose is also reserved in public libraries for months ahead.
Last Thursday, the 53-year-old author became the first Asian woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Swedish Academy honored her for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and reveals how fragile human life is. Han Kang became famous for her novel The Vegetarian, for which she won the Booker International Prize in 2016. His heroine decides to stop eating meat after a nightmare, but this only starts her defiance towards society.
Han Kang’s success caused a sensation in the country. Her alma mater, Jones University located in the metropolis of Seoul, hung a banner on the facade congratulating its former student. Han Kang studied Korean literature here between 1989 and 1993. Last week, current students dedicated a special edition of their student magazine to her. On Friday, they gave away the entire load of one thousand pieces on campus.
Another congratulatory banner appeared in the author’s hometown of Gwangju on a building that was shelled by a military helicopter during an anti-government uprising in 1980. Han Kang dedicated her novel Where the Grass Blooms to the victims of the massacre at that time.
South Korean President Jun Sok-yol congratulated the writer on Facebook. The parliament there adjourned to properly celebrate the news. And this week in the capital of Seoul, people left flowers and letters to the writer in front of her house in the Jeongno-gu district, writes the Korea Joongang Daily.
According to him, crowds also gathered in front of the independent bookstore Onul Books, which Han Kang has been running since 2018. It moved to a new address last year. It had to close last week due to the rush of customers. They came here hoping to see Han Kang on the spot.
But interest is growing not only in her, but in the whole of South Korean literature. For example, the Aladdin chain now sells twelve times more fiction than it did a year ago. Sales of the prose A List of Several Losses by the German author Judith Schalansky or classics such as Walden or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau, which Han Kang recommended to readers in an earlier interview, also increased rapidly in South Korea.
South Koreans leave flowers and letters to writer Han Kang outside her home in Seoul. | Photo: Jonhap / Profimedia.cz
For example, the ballad How Can I Love The Heartbreak, You’re The One I Love by Korean sibling duo Akmu from 2019 returned to the charts, which, according to the writer, inspired her prose I’m Not Saying Goodbye Forever.
In an interview published three years ago on YouTube, the author recalled hearing this song in a taxi. She was intrigued by the last stanza, likening a lover’s breakup to the drying up of the ocean. “At first I thought: how could the ocean dry up? But then the image overwhelmed me and I started to cry uncontrollably,” said Han Kang.
According to Reuters, South Korea’s literary community is now hoping to experience a similar boom in the West as the country’s rapper Psy and pop band BTS, the Netflix video series The Squid Game or the Oscar-winning film Parasite. All of them became a worldwide phenomenon.
South Korean literature, on the other hand, in the USA or Europe has remained rather in the shadow of that of Japan and China. “I grew up on Korean literature and I am very close to it. I hope that my award will be good news for all the Korean writers I consider my friends and readers,” Han Kang said last week.
She did not hold a press conference or give an interview. “I don’t drink alcohol, so when I hang up, I’ll have tea with my son and celebrate it in silence,” she just told Mats Malm, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, when he announced the news of the Nobel Prize last Thursday. The literary woman only found out about it a quarter of an hour in advance and at first refused to believe it. She thought it was a joke or fake news.
A week will soon pass from now, and Han Kang has yet to make a public appearance. Her father, also a well-known writer Han Sung-won, hinted this week that the daughter may continue to avoid the media spotlight. “She said that due to the wars between Russia and Ukraine or Israel and the Palestinians, in a situation where people are dying every day, she cannot hold a celebratory press conference,” said the father.
Han Kang is scheduled to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature on December 10 in Stockholm. In the Czech translation of Petra Ben-Ari, three of her novels were published by Odeon, the fourth, entitled Neloučím se saževių, will follow at the beginning of next year.
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