Feminists Around the World: Han Kang

Today we're celebrating the accomplishments of South Korean author Han Kang, who made history in 2024 when she won the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Okay, this is Anny and Samantha and welcome STEFFI never
told you production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
And we have entered My month. Yeah I called it
my month. So first celebrate me AAPI month. Just kidding,
but for real, it is Asian, American and Pacific Islander
Heritage Month. And as a Korean woman, I wanted to
jump in celebrating the works and accomplishments of a fellow Korean.

(00:40):
Han King, the Nobel Peace Prize winner for Literature of
twenty twenty four. King is a South Korean author who
has published quite a lot of books and poetry and
short stories. And in October of twenty twenty four, she
made history as the first Korean author to become a
Nobel Laureate and with that the eighteenth woman to be

(01:02):
awarded in this specific category. And yeah, it's for a
kind of a perspective. That's eighteen people out of one
hundred and twenty one people since nineteen oh one, so
it's great, but why anyway? Moving on? And but on
top of that, most of the winners, award winners, or

(01:23):
the most of the laureates for the last twenty years
have been white authors as well. So from an NPR
article written about her accomplishments they write. For the past
few decades, the Nobel Literature category has been dominated by
white authors. Between twenty and twenty twenty three, only seven
people of color have won. That's a significant change from

(01:46):
the Nobel Literature Awards of the nineteen eighties and early
nineteen nineties, when the authors of color from Egypt, Nigeria, Mexican, Japan,
Saint Lucia, and the US all won within the same decade. Again,
feels like we're backtracking, Yeah, anyway, but that's okay. We
were celebrating King and she has been a writer for

(02:06):
years and began with poetry in the early nineties, and
her first novel, Love Anyway Sue was written thirty years ago,
and I think she has written like eleven more novels
since then. I'm gonna have to go back in a look,
but around that number. She immediately jumped into her writing
career after graduating from the university as a reporter for
a monthly magazine, and soon published her first works again

(02:29):
in nineteen ninety three, the Poems, which included Winter in Seoul,
and soon after that published her first short story, The
Scarlet Anchor, which won the New Year's Literature Contest, so
she came out with a bang, Like all of her
writing apparently were just hits. We're gonna have to check
him out. And as she began her writing career, she
would even experiment with publishing a book with an accompaniment

(02:53):
music album which features her singing on it as well.
So multi talented, gotta love it. The book was titled
A Song to Sing Calmly. I really like that. Her
love of books and writing was a part of her
childhood and upbringing. Her own father quit his teaching job
to become a full time writer and novelist, and according
to her Wikipedia page, they use one of her quotes

(03:14):
about her childhood quote. Han later describes her childhood as
quote too much for a little child. However, being surrounded
by books gave her comfort, Like she talks about all
of that, and we'll talk a little bit about that
history in a minute, but she's talked a lot about
her experience during that time and how it has influenced
her writing quite a bit. From Guardian dot Com, they
write her childhood was overshadowed first by the loss of

(03:36):
her elder sister, born prematurely on the kitchen floor. I'd
been born and grown up in the place of that death,
she writes in the White Book, and ten years later,
by the public tragedy of the Guangju massacre in January
nineteen eighty, when Han was nine, four months before the protests,
her father gave up his teaching job and the family
moved to Seoul, and when she was twelve, she discovered

(03:58):
an album of photograph of the massacre taken by foreign
journalists on bookshelves, with the spine turned the wrong way.
My parents wanted to protect me, but I was curious,
she says, How could humans do this? And they go on.
It seems almost impossible that the softly spoken writer should
be the author of such deeply disturbing body of work.
All my novels are variations on the theme of human violence,

(04:20):
she says. As the foremost chronicler of South Korea's bloody
twentieth century, she has come to be regarded as her
country's spokesperson and conscience, shedding light on some of its
darkest periods in its struggle for democracy. Her twenty sixteen
novel Human Acts is a harrowing account of the brutally
suppressed student protests against the authoritarian government in May nineteen

(04:40):
eighty in the city of Guangxu, where Han grew up.
After ten days of demonstrations and estimated two thousand people,
mainly civilians, were shot, beaten, and tortured by the military forces.
Her new novel We Do Not Part looks back to
an earlier uprising against newly imposed martial law, this time
on Jju Island in the aftermath of the Second World War.

(05:02):
As many as thirty thousand inhabitants were murdered. Both massacres
were denied or downplayed by the government and right wing
groups for years, and they continue. Hans works gives voice
to those national traumas, but it's reached as universal. What
is humanity? She asks in Human Acts? What do we
have to do to keep humanity as one thing and
not another? Her novels are not just the literature of witness,

(05:25):
but acts of radical empathy. So it isn't surprising to
understand how her work has influenced so many and is
able to reach so many others. One of her more
famous works, her first book to be translated into English
as in Fact, The Vegetarian, was a catalyst to her
being recognized internationally and Yeah. She's been celebrated for her honesty, empathy,
and works of love and pain, so from a Nobelprize

(05:48):
dot Org. In her ouvra, she confronts historical traumas and
invisible sets of rules, and in each of her works
exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique
awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living
and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style,
has become an innovator in contemporary pros. Among her works

(06:08):
are The Vegetarian Human Acts and We Do Not Part.
And in an interview with NPR, she said, I always
feel I am questioning when I write novels, and I
wanted to deal with my long lasting question about human
violence and the possibility or impossibility of refusing it, she said,
And I will be happy if the readers could share
my questions. I think she's done a great job, and

(06:29):
I know, like with everything that has happened in South Korea,
she has been kind of a vital point and seeing
what's happening. But she has been very calm and I
think reserved to wait and see what's happening before she
actually speaks out, which is smart, honestly, but yeah, really
excited to get into her works, but at the same
time scared because it seems really intense.

Speaker 1 (06:51):
Yeah, yeah, we should definitely check it out, check some
of them out. Yes, I'm into it. You know. We
love good works of poetry and writing over here. As always, listeners,
If you have any suggestions for this segment, please let
us know. You can email us at Hello at stuff
onevertold You dot com. You can find us on Blue
skyte also podcasts, or in Instagram and TikTok at stuff

(07:14):
We Never Told You for us on YouTube. We have
a tea public store, and we have a book you
can get wherever you get your books. Thanks as always
to our super producer, Christina Executi, producer my Inder Trip.

Speaker 2 (07:22):
For Joey, Thank you and I'm Savvy, and.

Speaker 1 (07:26):
Thanks to you for listening. Steff one Ever told you
his projection of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart Radio,
you can check out the heart Radio app Apple Podcast
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