On Oct. 10, the Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to Han Kang, the first Asian woman writer and the first Korean writer to win the prize. According to Hayun Cho, an assistant professor of Korean literature and popular culture at the University of Notre Dame, Han’s win is moving for many, including for readers of the Korean diaspora.

“Han, whose writing career spans more than two decades, has irrevocably changed the contemporary landscape of Korean literature,” Cho said. “Winning the prize or not winning it does not change this fact. Han’s grounded response to the prize, such as her refusal to hold a press conference, exhibits a courageous dedication to literary practice on her own terms.”

Han’s writing demands “a commitment to witnessing strangeness, difference, violence and transcendence in the human experience,” Cho noted, with the author’s lyrical prose marked by “sharp testimonial instincts, tending to entanglements between the personal and political.”

“Han’s work lingers at what has been silenced and unravels what has been normalized,” she said. “Han has been received by many readers as a feminist writer due to her subversive portrayals of gendered and sexualized embodiment in her fictional works such as ‘The Vegetarian,’ which begins with a corporate worker’s description of his wife, whom he describes as passive and unremarkable. The novel is set into motion through the woman’s refusal to eat meat and wear a bra, revealing fragmented glimpses into her surreal interiority consisting of violent dreams and memories.

“Han’s other novels such as ‘Human Acts,’ which confronts traumas of the May 1980 Gwangju uprising, and ‘Greek Lessons,’ which follows the relationship between a grieving woman and her Greek teacher, interrogate what it means to narrativize loss.”