We Have Arrived: Anton Hur on Han Kang’s Nobel Win

In this moving and revealing essay, writer and translator Anton Hur brings his trademark wit to reflect on the 'earthquake' moment of Han Kang winning the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature and comment on literary prize cultures.

I was in a Zoom meeting for the 2025 International Booker Prize when I heard the news. We were trying to have a Serious Discussion about Serious Literature, and all of a sudden, I thought an earthquake was happening in the UK because half the people in the London Zoom window had bolted out of their seats. Annoyed at this interruption, I leaned into my Zoom camera and said, ‘What is going on over there?’

‘Anton, Han Kang has won the Nobel Prize in Literature!’

Our Serious Discussion grounded to a halt as we became as giddy as schoolchildren. Han Kang and Debora Smith had won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for The Vegetarian, and our jury chair for the 2025 International Booker Prize, Max Porter, had been the editor of that edition. Max was on his feet, a look of total disbelief in his face. I congratulated him, because I needed to congratulate someone in that moment, and he seemed to be logically the most proximate person to Han Kang. Apparently, other people thought that about me, because they started to congratulate me as well — for merely sharing the same nationality as Han Kang! (I do not translate Han Kang.)

Our meeting briefly fell apart, but we soon pulled ourselves together to reconvene, and all throughout the remainder of the Zoom, my phone buzzed with requests for comment from the BBC, the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Atlantic — apparently, neither Han Kang nor Deborah Smith were answering their phones … Colleagues were congratulating me from around the world — but, I have nothing to do with Han Kang!

But then again, why am I crying?

*

Han Kang writes from a deep reserve of national trauma, most famously for the 5.18 Gwangju Democracy Movement (Human Acts), and more recently for the 4.3 Jeju Massacre (We Do Not Part) — two events noted not only for their violent brutality, but also for the cover-up that followed. 5.18 was a 1980 pro-democracy uprising that was brutally put down by the South Korean military forces under US watch, while 4.3 happened on the eve of the Korean War, where a labour dispute in the island province of Jeju suddenly turned into a prolonged, bloody massacre — also during a time of American military control of South Korea.

For decades, Koreans – and the world – were gaslit by the successive dictatorial and conservative governments aided by American complicity (the US, to this day, has operational command of the South Korean armed forces) in driving any records or memories of 5.18 and 4.3 underground in the name of anti-Communism and compliance to the American side of the Cold War. Many lives were ruined or destroyed in the efforts to cover up or play down the events of these two atrocities, with activists, writers, and other ordinary citizens losing their lives simply for telling the truth of what had happened.

That 5.18 was a civilian-led pro-democracy movement, and not a riot instigated by North Korean spies, became mainstreamed only in the late nineties, when the taboo was lifted and a national reckoning took place. 4.3, likely because it was one of the events that led to the outbreak of the Korean War, and therefore positions South Korea and the US as the aggressor, still remains a fairly taboo subject —despite the best efforts of authors such as Han Kang and Kyung-Sook Shin in recent years to mainstream the truth of what really happened. But now, with the author of Human Acts and We Do Not Part winning the 2024 Nobel Prize, the decades-long historical correction finally seems close to complete. (You can tell by how the conservatives are protesting in front of the Swedish Embassy in Seoul over Han Kang’s win, a pettiness only matched by all the whining in establishment literary circles about how it should’ve gone to someone else.)

These historical implications of Han Kang’s win have largely been overlooked by Western media, likely out of ignorance and racism. It’s much easier to interpret Han’s win as a win for feminism in a misogynistic society, which it is, of course. Although one wonders if the smugness coming from the West regarding misogyny seems a bit like the pot calling the kettle a woman-hater, a way for white people to gloss over their own anti-women and colonial violence – both depicted in Han’s books – by invoking some kind of superiority in the context of human rights — a claim the 'global majority' currently finds especially contemptible in the West’s ongoing and blatant complicity in the Palestinian genocide. Deborah Smith has written an excellent translator’s note for Human Acts that still remains the go-to English-language document for me when I am asked to historically contextualise 5.18 for an English-reading audience. Reading Han Kang in English alongside Smith’s succinctly written note is an experience that is hard to describe; for a Korean who grew up in Korea during the 1980s and 1990s, explaining this national trauma to non-Koreans seemed simply impossible, because there was simply so much misinformation committed to the record that needed to be explained, too many tiresome questions to answer, and too many Western interests attempting to pervert historical truth.  

Wasn’t Korea a rich country? Didn’t the Americans ‘rescue’ Koreans from war and poverty and then give us democracy, like some master giving the hired help an old sweater? Why was I not performing gratitude to our American saviours?

I could not think of how these questions could be answered in a way that was informative — not just factually, but also emotionally. But I didn’t need to anymore. Because here was this book. Human Acts did something I had been convinced was impossible. All it took for Han Kang was a single, slim book to do it.

What was incredibly moving was not just the book itself, but the fact that a thing I thought could never be turned into literature had been turned into literature. This liberated me, as a reader and translator and writer. It made me see that the truth, while seemingly the faintest and weakest thing we have, is also the most persistent. And therefore, the most powerful.

*

But maybe I was really in tears because it’s a blessed relief to never again receive this truly asinine question from the Korean press for the rest of my life: when is Korea going to win the Nobel for Literature?

It has been, I kid you not, decades of this question being asked over and over again. Everyone knows the Nobel Prize is bullshit, and there’s no reason anyone, much less Koreans, should care so much about what is essentially another local European book prize, but the Korean press and academics and translation funding bodies have absolutely cared, and those are the people who directly influence the livelihood of Korean translators, and the success and failure of Korean literature in translation.

Every year when Ko Un ‘failed’ to win the Nobel, the Korean press, like clockwork, wrote articles about how it was because we Korean translators had failed our authors — a claim so persistent that people are still saying it in the wake of Han Kang’s win. Academics would opine that Korea could not win the Nobel because the Korean language was too beautiful to be translated faithfully into the crude and inferior Western languages that the Swedish Academy read in, carting out the same old tired examples of the eighty ways of saying 'yellowish' in Korean (I assure you that no normal Korean says 'yellowish' in more than three ways), which has given many mediocre journalists many a quotable paragraph to meet their deadlines with. I had come to hate Nobel season because it meant my hardworking colleagues and I would be thrown under the bus yet again by said mediocre journalists; indeed, an obviously misogynist newscast after Han’s win claimed that Ko had never managed to win because of a failure of translation, while Han won because its translation transcended the original. Na Gyeong-won – a conservative National Assembly member who certainly gets my vote for the worst politician working in Korea today – also posted on Facebook that Ko couldn’t win because of the ‘limitations’ of translation. Meanwhile, in the real world, Korean translators have brought Korean literature to a readership of literal millions around the world and won virtually every international literary honour in the process for Korean literature, including, now, the Nobel Prize. I pity the journalists who are going to have to learn how to write a new article now.

So this is it. We have arrived. Congratulations, Korea! We did it! How do we feel? Do we feel less anxious? I hope we feel less anxious. Ko Un, I hope you’re relieved at least that the annual phalanx of reporters waiting outside your house during Nobel season will soon be a distant memory. Ditto to the ambitious striver Hwang Sok-yong. The pressure is off all of us now. Except for Han Kang; I can’t help but feel a pang of sympathy for her, now that her schedule over the next year is about to go into overdrive. Han had already paved the way for literature in translation with the unexpected international success of The Vegetarian, a burden this purveyor of quiet (if ominous) literary landscapes had never asked for, and here she is again being handed a shovel and a hardhat. As a Korean literary translator, I have always felt grateful to Han Kang, and not a little apologetic.

I hope, soon enough, that we as a nation will look back to the years before this moment and ask ourselves: why did it matter so much? Why did we feel so entitled to this win, and so slighted when it didn’t happen? I know I shouldn’t say this publicly as the juror of several literary prizes, but why did Korea want these baubles, these silly international report cards, so badly? This is not to say that maybe the real prize is the friends we made along the way, but … maybe the real prize is the friends we made along the way. The international readers, the incredible connections, the miracle of literature as it traverses the borders of language itself — a miracle I have the privilege of partaking in every time I sit down to translate.

And maybe, someday, Koreans will be too cool for literary prizes, and we will all float in rarefied air, devoid of anxiety, our gaze turned solely to the horizon of an unimaginably peaceful, shining future.

But on that night, I cried. That night, I acted like an earthquake had just happened. Because it had.

Cover photo by Anastacia Dvi on Unsplash