Here’s why Han Kang is refusing to celebrate her Nobel Prize.
Han Kang won the Nobel Prize last week, and no, we’re still not over it! Beating out a sea of favored predictions, Kang’s singularly surreal and audacious prose was a dark horse for Big Swede recognition.
The academy praised Kang “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” And in The New Republic, editor Mark Krotov noted the author’s political sensibility in novels like The Vegetarian. In which Booker-winning opus Kang “reckons with state violence.”
In a great feat of walking her own walk, the author is refusing to celebrate her prize. Because of that state violence.
On Friday, Kang shared via paternal proxy that she will not be holding the typical press conference to fete her Nobel win. Her father, the novelist Han Seung-wo, explained her political choice. “She said that with the wars raging between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, with deaths being reported every day, she could not hold a celebratory press conference,” Seung-wo told Korean reporters. “She asked for understanding in this matter.”
Kang is the first Asian Nobel laureate since the the Chinese novelist Mo Yan’s controversial selection in 2012. She is also the first Asian woman, and the first South Korean, to be recognized by the Scandinavian tribunal since…ever.
Though her books have been selling out globally since the announcement—and Korea is celebrating on the author’s behalf—Kang continues to refrain from public comment as of this evening.
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