Cataclysmic migraines, literate household, ban in libraries: some details about Nobel Prize winner Han Kang | Culture | EUROtoday

1. Han Kang’s work strikes on a double aircraft. He tells us that phrases are inadequate, however acknowledges that it’s the solely factor we have now at hand to deal with private ache (The white paper, Greek class), household violence and social alienation (The vegetarian) or the collective wound (human acts).

2. Like many Koreans of his era, Han Kang (1970) grew up studying Latin American writers. Korea was removed from being a technological energy and noticed itself within the mirror within the dictatorships of the Southern Cone and the Caribbean, in that pressure between a rural world that was falling aside and an city one which was rising with the blow of cement.

3. human acts It takes place in Gwanju in the course of the 1980 bloodbath that led to the top of a forty-year dictatorship. Months earlier, Han Kang had moved along with his household to the Suyu-ri district in Seoul. Images of a coliseum stuffed with our bodies and flies traveled to her. The e-book strikes between the grotesque particulars of a courtroom report, Rulfian echoes and the ache of survivor syndrome.

4. Suyu-ri is talked about a number of occasions in Greek class. It is a definitive psychogeographic aspect in a novel the place a lifeless language occupies a central place together with the progressive lack of speech and imaginative and prescient of the protagonists. However, Korean audiences don’t affiliate Han Kang with Suyu-ri. For everybody it’s the place the place probably the most well-known comic within the nation grew up. Not even a Nobel Prize winner will be capable of unseat Yoo Jae-Suk, omnipresent on tv and in commercials for immediate noodles, vitality drinks and ice cream.

5. Han Kang’s father is a author and so is his older brother. With the Nobel Prize, the youngest of the household has subverted the sacred patrilineal order through which the eldest son has all of the privileges and obligations.

6. Father and daughter received the Yi Sang Award (1988/2005). Yi Sang is maybe probably the most radical author in Korean literature. He wrote in the course of the Thirties below the Japanese occupation of Korea. An architect by occupation, he revealed poems that embrace numbers, strains, factors, equations and diagrams. His is the phrase that Han Kang was obsessive about when writing The vegetarian: “I think humans should be plants.”

7. As in so many works that aspire to be literary, the lady protagonist of The vegetarian refusing to eat meat is an allegory. Saying no to your husband and household is a extremely disruptive act in a society ruled by nunchithat skill to appropriately learn a state of affairs in order to not trouble others and above all to not alter hierarchies.

8. In some libraries and colleges within the Seoul metropolitan area The vegetarian It is prohibited for distorting sexuality amongst kids.

9. Sunme Yoon learn The vegetarian and he or she was so impressed that she determined to translate it into Spanish. He satisfied the Argentine writer Bajo La Luna to publish it in 2012, 4 years earlier than it got here out in English and received the Man Booker Prize. Until then, nobody had heard of Han Kang exterior of Korea. It was Yoon, raised in Buenos Aires, who was liable for paving the best way for him within the West (The Vegetarian It was solely translated into Japanese. To this present day, the author considers this reality as the start of a domino impact and is proud that her literature has entered via the least anticipated door.

10. During the right-wing authorities of Park Geun-hye (2013-2017), Han Kang was a part of a blacklist on behalf of human acts.

11. After receiving the Booker in 2016, Han Kang was desperate to disappear. “It is impossible to worry about attention and write at the same time.” When she obtained a second name from the Swedish Academy after the Nobel announcement, she sounded terrified.

12. The award got here hours after the vacation in honor of Hangul, the Korean alphabet created in 1443 by the courtroom of King Sejong in order that the poorest may learn and write. Until then, solely the the Aristocracy learn and wrote in Chinese. The king’s critics contemptuously known as him amkeul (letter for ladies) because of the benefit of studying it.

13. The author suffers from cataclysmic migraines. “Knowing myself vulnerable makes me humble,” he mentioned. Han Kang’s literature aspires to silence.