Han Kang made her debut as a writer of fiction in 1994 when her short story “Red Anchor” won the Spring Literary Contest sponsored by Seoul Shinmun. She then went on to win numerous literary awards in Korea in the following decades, but it wasn’t until The Vegetarian, her first novel to be translated into English, won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 that she gained global recognition. Then in 2024, she received the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming not only the first person from Korea but the first Asian woman to win the world’s most prestigious literary prize. Today, Han Kang’s name has become synonymous with contemporary Korean literature.
In December of 2024, Han traveled to Sweden to deliver her Nobel lecture at the Swedish Academy. The title of that lecture was translated into English as “Light and Thread,” a rather uplifting title for an author whose works are famous for dealing with the dark side of humanity. The full text of this lecture, translated into English by e.yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, serves as the opening to this book of the same title. The rest of the volume, consisting of essays, poems, photographs, and diary entries, is rendered into English by Maya West.
The titular lecture is a reflection on Han’s writing career and her approach to writing. She reveals that, for her, writing is a process that begins with questions: “Each time I work on a novel, I endure the questions, I live inside them. When I reach the end of these questions — which is not the same as when I find answers to them — is when I reach the end of the writing process.” Each novel is different and demands of the author, if not answers, then at least a struggling with various questions. And yet, somehow, all of these questions circle back to one fundamental theme. Making her way through a paradoxical world that is somehow both violent and beautiful, she asks, “From my earliest novel to my latest, hadn’t the deepest layer of my inquiries always been directed toward love?”
This is the thread that runs through this book like a beam of light, drawing everything together and illuminating it at the same time. In the short essay “Even in the Darkest Night,” she recalls a childhood incident that caused her to have an epiphany: Everyone has their own unique perspective on the world. A longer collection of meditations from 2022, after the publication of We Do Not Part, follows, allowing us to journey with the author through the stages of grief she experiences upon finishing a work, ultimately ending up in a place where she can ask: “Shouldn’t I be writing things that speak of life, while life yet remains?”
Perhaps the most fascinating parts of this book are those that are least expected: an essay on a small house she bought with a tiny, north-facing garden that she cultivated, as well as a diary she kept about this garden from March 2021 to May 2023. While the essay and diary are ostensibly about the garden, they are fundamentally about the author’s relationship with light. “I never really knew what sunlight was,” she confesses, “before I had this garden.”
Whether you are a long-time Han Kang fan or are only learning about her now, this book will provide an intriguing glimpse into the mind of an artist. Inspirational, cathartic, and uplifting, it will leave you thinking about the threads that bind us all together in the light.
한국국제교류재단
