"What a great day for Korea!" my mom wrote to me on Thursday. "Nobel for Han Kang!" For the past few decades, several South Korean authors have been bruited about as contenders for the Nobel Prize in Literature, notably the poet Ko Un and the novelist Hwang Sok-yong, elder statesmen who were both previously jailed for political activism. As an American-born writer of Korean ancestry, I liked these authors in theory, but their actual work didn't jump off the page for me, an English-only reader.
When I started writing my novel Same Bed Different Dreams in 2014, the thought of a South Korean Nobel laureate was very much on my mind. As in: It will never happen. I remembered attending a publisher's lunch in 2008 for Hwang, whose gravitas and gentleness impressed me greatly; unfortunately, I was the only member of the media there. Nobody cares about Korea, I thought.
The first scene I wrote was set at a New York dinner party held in Echo's honor, at which his (white) U.S. publisher, Tanner Slow, says to the narrator: "Echo is the most fantastic Korean writer you've never heard of. A situation that is going to change, and change soon... Now, I'm not supposed to say this, but a source tells me Echo's on the secret long list for the... you know. The Big N. The Nobel Prize."
#nobel-prize-in-literature #han-kang #south-korean-literature #cultural-critique #literary-recognition
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