‘I want to be hopeful’: Nobel prize-winning novelist Han Kang on the crisis in South Korea

With protests on the streets of Seoul, the celebrated writer talks about the painful process of uncovering her country’s brutal past - and how it felt to win the Nobel prize

On 10 December last year, the novelist and poet Han Kang had just finished having supper with her 24-year-old son at home in Seoul. They were discussing which tea to have – peppermint, berry or chamomile – when the phone rang. It was the Swedish Academy in Stockholm calling to tell her she had been awarded the Nobel prize in literature. Her first thought was to check the news, which confirmed that she was indeed the first Korean writer to become Nobel laureate. At 54, she is young by Nobel standards. She couldn’t call anyone, not even her parents, because her mobile phone was “on fire” with messages. She turned the sound off and she and her son returned to the question of tea. They plumped for camomile. “I thought we needed to calm down,” she laughs on a video call from Seoul. “It was a very, very peaceful evening.”

It was not so serene in the rest of the country. Han Kang fever swept across South Korea: government meetings were interrupted to celebrate the news; the printing presses couldn’t keep up with the demand for her books; the price of secondhand copies rocketed, and a trend for transcribing her work and posting it on social media took off. Han was not prepared for her new status as national hero. “Too much attention is not very good for writers,” she says, in her careful English. “You need anonymity, to be able to take a stroll in the street. You really need your calm inside.”

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