This year’s Nobel-winning writer shows the dark power of dictatorship

Han Kang’s dark and gripping fiction is inflected by the atrocities of a Korean massacre – but will enthrall readers of any background

“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry,” WH Auden wrote of WB Yeats, and it could be said that mad South Korea hurt Han Kang into becoming a novelist. Much of the work of this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature – who was commended on Thursday by the Swedish Academy for her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life” – is informed by one of the greatest atrocities of modern history: the massacre that occurred in her birthplace, Gwangju, in 1980. 
“‘Looks like rain,’ you mutter to yourself. “‘What’ll we do if it really chucks it down?’” The opening to Han’s 2014 novel Human Acts seems mundane, but it soon takes on a sinister edge, as we realise that the mutterer is a 15-year-old boy tasked with sorting out the piles of corpses that relatives are coming to claim following the massacre. There are too many to store indoors; rain will hasten their decay.
In reality, the doomed uprising in the city of Gwangju took place a few months after the assassination of the dictator Park Chung-hee; it was a student-led protest at the imposition of martial law by his protégé and successor, Chun Doo-hwan. In response, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of protesters were gunned down by the military. One of Han’s motivations for writing her novel was the polite refusal across South Korea to discuss the past when, three decades later, Park’s daughter Park Geun-hye was elected president.
The nine-year-old Han Kang had left Gwangju four months before the massacre, when her family moved to Seoul; the facts about what happened were then kept from her until, aged 12, she found a memorial book of photographs, curated by foreign journalists, the copy hidden high in her father’s bookcase. “I remember the moment when my gaze fell upon the mutilated face of a young woman, her features slashed through with a bayonet,” she later wrote. “Silently, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke.”
A mixture of survivor’s guilt and a horror at mankind’s capacity for inhumanity left Han deeply affected. Fearful of the unpredictability of humans, she became happiest seeking solace and enlightenment in books, and in due course, she became a writer herself. Human cruelty has always been at the heart of her fiction. As she put it in an interview with The Independent last year, she cares about “how far humanity can go and still be human… it’s a conundrum, a fundamental question within me, so it comes out in whatever I write.”
Her 2007 novel The Vegetarian was her breakthrough in the Anglophone world. Translated by the young Briton Deborah Smith, it appeared in English in 2015 and won the International Booker Prize. It’s the story of Yeong-hye, a woman who becomes alienated from her family and society when she gives up eating meat. Han has described it in fabular terms: “This novel deals with human violence and the (im)possibility of refusing it… Yeong-hye desperately refuses meat to reject human brutality.”
Eventually, Han felt able to write Human Acts (Korean, 2014; English, 2016), tackling head-on one of the many mechanised slaughters that have punctuated 20th- and 21st-century history. Writing about fictionalised versions of the people caught up in the massacre and the long aftermath of grief was harrowing. She claimed that she could often only produce three or four lines a day – “but [the victims] couldn’t testify because they were dead, so I wanted to lend my own body and voice to them.” Again, though, the novel isn’t strictly realistic: some scenes are written from the perspective of the “hon”, or soul, of a dead teenager, who watches what becomes of his corpse and laments his own death.
Han has modestly suggested that her international recognition has partly come about as a result of the explosion of interest in Korean music and film. Her work certainly offers a rich new contextualisation of what has been going on in her homeland in recent decades. But it succeeds on account of its vivid universality: readers from all backgrounds can respond to her granular depictions of what it’s like to experience grief and fear. 
A final note. We Anglophones are lucky to have been able to read Han’s novels at all. Deborah Smith, who taught herself Korean on realising there was a dearth of English-to-Korean translators, spent years relentlessly championing Han’s work until she found a British publisher for it. Yet Smith has recently suggested that ill health has made it difficult for her to keep working in the field of translation, which is famously precarious and poorly paid. As readers celebrate Han Kang’s Nobel win, then, we ought to ask: with a publishing ecosystem so hostile to translators, how many writers of equal quality are we never getting to see?
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