The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Han Kang on Thursday stands as yet another validation of the outsize soft power of the South Korean cultural juggernaut.
Ms. Han is both the first South Korean and the first Asian woman to win the Nobel, the world’s most prestigious literary prize, in its 123-year history. Her achievement follows Bong Joon Ho’s best-picture Oscar for “Parasite” in 2020, as well as the broad popular success of television shows like Netflix’s “Squid Game” and K-pop acts like BTS and Blackpink.
The win by Ms. Han, who is best known outside her home country for “The Vegetarian,” is fitting at a time when female novelists and poets from South Korea have flourished, particularly in translation, sending a wave of works into the hands of international readers.
But while her victory was widely celebrated as a crowning cultural achievement for South Korea, what Ms. Han and these female writers represent is a form of rebellion against South Korean culture, which remains deeply patriarchal and often misogynistic.
Only one of the 10 heads of the country’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has been a woman since it assumed its current name in 2008. Until Ms. Han’s triumph, South Korea’s male-dominated literary critics’ circles had long championed the poet Ko Un as the country’s most likely and deserving Nobel candidate. Before allegations of sexual abuse surfaced against him, local reporters would gather in front of his home when the Nobel announcement was imminent. Ms. Han never drew such crowds.
For her and other female authors in South Korea, writing “is a form of dissent and a form of resistance,” said Bora Chung, a writer whose collection of short stories, “Cursed Bunny,” was published in English in 2022. Ms. Chung’s book was one of several by female writers recommended by Ms. Han herself in The New York Times last year.
South Korea has an obsession with the international recognition that comes with awards like Olympic golds and Nobel Prizes. Until Thursday, it had produced only one Nobel laureate: a former president, Kim Dae-jung, who won the Peace Prize in 2000 for his fight for democracy under military rule and his efforts to build reconciliation and peace with North Korea.
That Nobel and now the one for Ms. Han are both deeply tied to South Korea’s tumultuous modern history, which has been marked by the division of the Korean Peninsula, a war, military dictatorship and a long and often bloody struggle for democracy and labor rights.
In South Korea, Ms. Han is best known for “Human Acts,” a novel about the massacre of democracy activists in Gwangju in 1980.
The government of Park Geun-hye, the conservative president of South Korea from 2013 until her impeachment in 2017, put Ms. Han on a “blacklist” of writers, artists and directors it considered unfriendly and barred from government-controlled support programs, according to Kang Yu-jung, an opposition lawmaker.
The list has never been made public, but Ms. Han was blackballed because the brutal crackdown chronicled in “Human Acts” was carried out by a past conservative dictatorship, Ms. Kang said. “We Do Not Part,” Ms. Han’s 2021 novel, discussed another civilian massacre that many conservative South Koreans did not want to see in public debate.
“The Vegetarian,” Ms. Han’s most widely read book internationally, is a chronicle of violence at a more intimate scale, of a woman oppressed in her own home.
Ms. Han has said she draws inspiration in her writing from questions raised by “human violence” throughout South Korea’s history. She said her “sense of guilt” over meat consumption, a key element of “The Vegetarian,” was linked to the massacre in Gwangju, her home city.
Referring to her writing process for “Human Acts,” she said: “The feeling I had most often while writing the book was pain, an overwhelming pain. I cried almost every day when I wrote the novel.”
While Ms. Han’s work tackles this heavy historical freight, it can also be seen as feminist. In “The Vegetarian,” the protagonist’s decision to avoid meat can be read as an act of resistance against patriarchal systems.
With women still facing discrimination in politics, the business world and the news media in South Korea, literature is an outlet where they can express their power.
“It’s one of the few spaces where you can be freed from gender,” said Krys Lee, a novelist who lives in Seoul. “You can write all of the ages and all genders.”
Other female writers said they were not surprised that it was a woman now representing South Korea’s literary power on the global stage.
“Literature, even when it was dominated by men, the strongest voices came from the most oppressed,” said Euny Hong, the author of “The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture.”
“People in troubled situations or marginalized groups,” Ms. Hong said, “have to have a very clear and loud voice or they won’t be heard, and that has always been reflected in literature.”
Female readers have also become more powerful in the South Korean literary market in recent years with the growing class of professional women, Ms. Lee, the novelist, said. The rise of activism against sexual harassment and assault internationally and within South Korea has also created a hunger for women’s voices.
Ms. Han comes “from a certain generation of women who grew up under a patriarchal system and also a country with a modern history of violence, and I think her work speaks to that,” Ms. Lee said.
Many of the books by women that are being translated into English — including some that lean more commercial than strictly literary — have tackled what are often considered typical subjects for women, like motherhood or body image. These topics reflect the interests of many American and British readers.
Among the South Korean fiction that has resonated internationally has been “Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982,” a novel by Cho Nam-Joo about a young stay-at-home mother who suffers a psychotic break, and “Please Look After Mom” by Kyung-sook Shin, about a martyred mother who goes missing. That novel won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011.
Still, readers seem to want more than overt feminist material.
“We’re all just excited to see different types of stories, and that also is reflected in the different genres that are being written and translated,” said Chi-Young Kim, who has translated numerous South Korean novels into English, including “Please Look After Mom.”
“Thirty years ago, it was very literary work that was being translated into English,” Ms. Kim said. “And now you’re seeing sci-fi and fantasy and memoir being translated.”
The biggest limitation, she said, is the number of translators. Government funding for cultural and arts education in schools has been declining in recent years.
“We just need more translators to be able to bring all the diversity and amazing breadth of Korean literature into English and other languages too,” Ms. Kim said.
South Korea’s literary community and members of its international diaspora hope that Ms. Han’s Nobel victory can draw the spotlight to books in the way that films and television shows have made South Korean stories so popular in those mediums.
“Because of Korean movies first, people are recognizing that Koreans are very good storytellers,” Ms. Hong said.
Ms. Han’s award “will bring this new appreciation for Korean high culture because it’s a country that’s been known for a while for producing popular culture,” Ms. Hong said. “But it’s not just a nation of pop culture. It’s also a nation of ideas. So I think that’s sort of the revelation. Oh, Korea doesn’t just make films and bands. They also have an amazing literary richness.”
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