South Korean novelist Han Kang awarded
In France, Han Kang is noted for “Impossible Farewells” (Ed. Grasset), Prix Médicis Étranger 2023. A story of friendship between two women against the backdrop of war. In the novel, Inseon asks her friend Gyeongha to come and feed her parrot while she is in the hospital. In the middle of a snowstorm, Gyeongha ends up arriving at her friend’s house, discovering a mausoleum to the 30,000 dead communist civilians killed between November 1948 and early 1949… A powerful work fighting against oblivion, a hymn to friendship and ‘imaginary.
Born in 1970 in Gwangju (South Korea), Han Kang studied literature at Yonsei University in Seoul and began her literary career as a poet. In 2016, she won the Man Booker International Prize (a leading international prize for works translated into English) for The Vegetarian (Ed. The Feathered Snake). This novel tells the story of Yŏnghye, an ordinary woman emptying her fridge of meat one day, getting closer to nature, between dreamlike, eroticism and madness.
The Nobel Committee had suggested that it would honor the South or the East more than the West, which is too often rewarded. But the bettors were betting more on the Chinese Can Xue, the Japanese Haruki Murakami and the Romanian Mircea Catarescu. South Korea, with its Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2019 for “Parasite”, its wildly successful dystopian series “Squid Game”, on Netflix, its K-pop, its K-drama and now its Nobel, won the A great success for this small, big country of 51 million inhabitants.