OR Han Kang from South Korea has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2024. The author has distinguished herself in her country and internationally for her novel “The Vegetarian”which won the Booker Prize in 2016. “Kang’s empathy, primarily for the vulnerable lives of women, is immediately felt in her pages and enhanced by the metaphorical power of her prose,” said Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel committee, adding : “He has understood in a unique way how the soul is connected to the body, how the living are connected to the dead. Based on her poetic and experimental style, she has proven to be an innovator in modern prose.” Kang was born in 1970 in Guangzhoua city in the southwest of South Korea. When she was ten, her family moved to Seoul, where Han Kang studied Korean Literature at Yeonse University. In Greek, her works “The Vegetarian”, translated by Amalia Tziotis, Kastaniotis Publications 2020, and “Greek Lesson”, translated by her (both books from the Korean), Kastaniotis Publications 2022, are published. Han Gang has also published the short story collections “The Fruits of My Wife” (2000) and “The Fire Salamander” (2012), as well as the novels “Black Deer” (1998), “Your Cold Hands” (2002), “The Wind Blows, go” (2010), “Human Actions” (2014), “The White Book” (2016) and “I Don’t Forget” (2021).

“The vegetarian” is a terrifying story of refusal to eat meat, where the moral and social misrecognition of women, the physical and psychological violence, which is exercised against her, as well as the tyrannical assertion of female autonomy, dominate. The book clearly looks towards the theme of the eco-novel, simultaneously conversing with the world of absurdity and Kafkaesque transformations, as well as with a climate of hallucinatory images that may have multiple (not only psychiatric) origins.

OR YongHye she has decided for almost transcendent reasons (because she had a dream) to stop eating meat, which causes a storm of family reactions: from her father, mother and siblings to her husband. The husband is disgusted and repulsed by his wife, who defies the norm of tradition, undermining his male ego, and will not hesitate to rape her in order to discipline her. The heroine’s son-in-law also participates in the family’s dance of extreme reactions, who enters her house with his camera (he is a visual and film artist), ending up imposing his own ego on the bed. YongHe’s incarceration ends up in a mental hospital, where a forced-feeding program is implemented. Absurdity invades when YongHe, under these unbearable pressures, wants and tries to transform into a plant.

Torture under the patriarchal rule, where the protagonist will be fed into the machine of social conventions, a nightmarish play with Kafka’s transformations, a narrative with incessant twists and breath-taking expression, poetic images of nature and cinematic writing. A social, cultural, gender, ecological, but also existential thriller.

At “Greek Lesson” starring a mute woman and an almost blind man. They share their desolation and loneliness. At a given moment he is deprived of his glasses (they break), without which it is impossible to teach ancient Greek to her (her only refuge). Then the two will come closer, in a redemptive cohabitation of help and solidarity. Shattered memories and multi-modal monologues compose the fabric of a narrative through which Han Kang demonstrates the brilliance of her technique and the depth of her sensitivity.