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. 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.