Photo-Illustration: Vulture
Han Kang is a private person. When she won last year’s Nobel Prize for literature, it was widely reported in the South Korean press that she was married to the literary critic Hong Yong-hee. They have actually been divorced for years. She has written very little about herself, and while many characters and protagonists share aspects of her life story — the writer-narrator of 2017’s Human Acts learns about the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, in which around 2,000 students and workers were massacred by the Korean army, from a hidden book of photographs, just as Han did — these details do not so much illuminate their author’s life as establish a novelistic consciousness to be invaded and deformed, again and again, by the…
