South Korean woman wins Nobel Prize for literature

Han Kang won the prize for intense prose confronting trauma and human fragility, the Nobel Committee said on Thursday. Kang grew up in Seoul, South Korea, with a noted novelist for a father, the committee said. In 1995 she debuted her first short story collection. In the ensuing years, she followed it up with other fictional works touching on topics from sculpture to vegetarianism to historical massacres. The committee described her 2007 novel The Vegetarian as one of the first to break into international markets—it follows a woman’s descent into mental illness after being neglected by her family. Her works have been translated into English, German, Swedish, and French.

What sort of religious background does Kang have? She began practicing Buddhism in her 20s, the Guardian reported in 2016. She withdrew from the practice following intense health struggles. The Nobel Committee noted that one of her works, The White Book, has been described as a secular prayer book, but didn’t explain the description. In the book, the narrator talks with an elder sister who died shortly after childbirth. The narrator realizes that if the older sister hadn’t died, she herself would not have come into the world.

Dig deeper: Read Paul Kengor’s column in WORLD Magazine about three mid-20th-Century books addressing the root spiritual issues within communism.