The announcement of the South Korean author Hawn Kang because the 2024 Nobel Literature laureate is a triumph not just for Korean literature but additionally a reminder of the large attain and affect of small press publishing, which takes on a lot of the heavy work of introducing literature in translation to a wider viewers.
Although Han’s most up-to-date work has been printed within the UK by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Random Home, her first novel, The Vegetarian, printed in South Korea in 2007, was printed by the now defunct impartial Portobello Books in 2015. It gained the Worldwide Booker prize the next 12 months.
Now Han’s total output has been honoured: works of spare, fierce prose, seemingly ethereal in transmission but brutal in impression. Whereas usually summary, they nonetheless powerfully wrestle with conventional Korean society and historical past.
The Vegetarian, which shocked many readers and critics with its specific imagery, is maybe her best-known work, a examine of violent particular person resistance towards an oppressive society. Within the novel, a younger, outwardly typical girl shocks her household and new husband by refusing to eat meat, solely to search out herself dangerously unmoored in a disapproving, carnivorous and patriarchal world. Like all Han’s work, the sublimated trauma and unexcavated reminiscences of her characters are in the end revealed to be of nationwide significance.
The prize win made headlines because it heralded the twin partnership of Han and translator Deborah Smith, on the time a PhD pupil who had discovered Korean from scratch three years earlier. Smith used her share of the £50,000 prize to arrange Tilted Axis Press, which focuses solely on literature in translation from east Asian writers. She went on to translate two additional novels of Han’s. The primary was Human Acts, a graphic and multi-layered account of the aftermath of the South Korean authorities’ bloody repression of a pupil rebellion in 1980 in Gwangju, which occurs to be Han’s dwelling metropolis. The historic significance of such testimony, even fictionalised, should absolutely have influenced the Nobel committee.
Each Human Acts and The White Ebook, a quick, deeply affecting novel of grief, transmutation and therapeutic, which meditates on the life and demise of a new child sister, had been additionally introduced out by Portobello. By this time there had been some heated public criticism over Smith’s methodology of translation – or “mistranslation” – of The Vegetarian, following articles by the critic and writer Tim Parks within the New York Evaluation of Books and educational Chanse Yun within the LA Instances. Smith was accused of stylistic and different modifications which strongly differed from the unique Korean version of the novel. Smith defended herself in a chunk for the LA Evaluation of Books: maybe most significantly, her translations have been championed robustly by Han herself, as twin collaborations. Han’s most up-to-date e-book, Greek Classes, by which a trainer loses his sight and a pupil her voice, is co-translated by Smith and E Yaewon; a brand new novel in English, We Do Not Half, translated by Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, can be printed early subsequent 12 months.
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Han “performs language with the sort of near-unbearable depth which Jacqueline du Pré utilized to the cello”, Smith has stated. Tasja Dorkofikis, who was affiliate writer at Portobello when The Vegetarian was purchased, says of Han: “She strikes seamlessly between grief, historical past, reminiscence and language, placing the reader right into a meditative and reflective state.” The Korean author and translator Anton Hur, a choose for the 2025 Worldwide Booker prize, states it merely: “The Swedish Academy couldn’t have picked a extra excellent winner than Han Kang.”
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