To be human, is it to kill or to be killed?
Biography
About Han Kang
Han Kang (born 1970) is a South Korean author who in 2024 became the first South Korean writer — and the first Asian woman — to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Gwangju and raised in Seoul, she studied Korean literature at Yonsei University and published her first short stories in 1993. Her novel *The Vegetarian* (2007) — about a woman's radical refusal of meat — received international attention when Deborah Smith's English translation won the International Booker Prize in 2016.
Her subsequent novel *Human Acts* (2014) confronted the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, in which soldiers massacred hundreds of civilians, including neighbors of her childhood. " She teaches creative writing in Seoul.
Key Themes
Quick Facts
- Born
- 1970
- Status
- Living
- Age
- 56 yrs
- Quotes
- 5 collected
Wisdom
Han Kang's Famous Quotes
“To be human, is it to kill or to be killed?”
— Human Acts (2014)
This question — deceptively simple, morally devastating — runs through Han Kang's Gwangju novel, voiced by a young student confronting soldiers. It refuses easy pacifism or easy violence; it asks instead what kind of creature we are that we organize ourselves to kill or be killed. Han Kang received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024, with the committee citing her "intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life."
“I want to swallow you, have you melt into me and flow through my veins.”
— The Vegetarian (2007; English translation 2015)
From Han Kang's internationally acclaimed novel, this image appears as Yeong-hye, the protagonist, becomes obsessed with her husband's desire to consume and possess her. The line is disturbing precisely because it frames love as dissolution of self — a total merging that erases boundaries. Han Kang interrogates the violence embedded in the language of intimacy, questioning whether deep connection can exist without annihilation of the other.
“I want to be reborn as a tree.”
— The Vegetarian (2007)
The tree-aspiration is the culmination of Yeong-hye's transformation — she stops eating, stands in sunlight with arms raised, and speaks of becoming vegetable. Han Kang uses this not as madness but as a coherent philosophical response to a world of violence. Trees do not kill; they convert light into life. The desire to be a tree is the desire for a different relationship with the world — one without teeth.
“Why, is it such a bad thing to die?”
— The Vegetarian (2007)
Yeong-hye, the protagonist, is driven by dreams of violence toward a refusal of meat and eventually toward a desire to become a plant — standing in sunlight, photosynthesizing, needing no one. This quote captures her longing for a mode of existence that requires no killing, no consumption of other living things. It is a radical act of refusal against a society that demands appetite and compliance.
“The pain of others is a mirror for our own.”
— Human Acts (2014; English translation 2016)
Han Kang's novel about the 1980 Gwangju Uprising — where South Korean soldiers massacred hundreds of civilians — asks whether surviving others' suffering changes the survivor permanently. The "mirror" is not metaphorical comfort but a moral demand: witnessing pain makes it impossible to pretend we are unaffected. She wrote the book partly to process her own proximity to the massacre, having grown up in Gwangju.
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Han Kang (born 1970) is a South Korean author who in 2024 became the first South Korean writer — and the first Asian woman — to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Gwangju and raised in Seoul, she studied Korean literature at Yonsei University and published her first short stories in 1993. Her novel *The Vegetarian* (2007) — about a woman's radical refusal of meat — received international attention when Deborah Smith's English translation won the International Booker Prize in 2016. Her subsequent novel *Human Acts* (2014) confronted the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, in which soldiers massacred hundreds of civilians, including neighbors of her childhood. The Nobel Committee cited her "intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life." She teaches creative writing in Seoul. Han Kang lived b. 1970.
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