South Korean author Han Kang has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, making her the first writer from South Korea to receive this prestigious honor. At 53 years old, Han’s journey to becoming an acclaimed author is deeply entwined with her family’s history and her personal struggles. She has revealed that her life might not have existed at all if her sister hadn’t tragically died just two hours after birth. Moreover, Han has battled severe migraines since she was 14, stating, “If I were 100% healthy, I wouldn’t be a writer.”
In her notable work “White,” although it’s a novel, the character referred to as “that woman” embodies her imagination of the sister who could have survived and grown up. Han has mentioned that her parents never fully overcame the grief of losing their first daughter, and it was this tragedy that led to her mother giving birth to her. Han reflects on the idea that she “wanted to lend her life to her sister.”
In “White,” Han recounts the harrowing day her sister was born. Her mother, just 23 and unprepared, experienced a rupture of membranes without anyone by her side. She crawled to the kitchen to boil water and sterilize scissors, hurriedly sewing a newborn outfit before delivering the baby alone. Han describes her sister as “a tiny girl whose face was as pale as a half-moon cake. Although born eight months into the pregnancy and very small, her eyes, nose, and mouth were distinctly beautiful.”
As her mother held the premature infant, she repeatedly pleaded, “Please don’t die.” Tragically, the baby closed her eyes forever two hours later. Subsequent to that loss, the family endured another loss with the passing of a son before Han was born. Her mother expressed that if the earlier children had lived, Han likely wouldn’t have been conceived. In her book, Han conveys to her deceased sister: “If you were alive, I wouldn’t exist. And if I exist, then you shouldn’t.”
Within Han’s works, the intangible presence of her sister looms large. In the concluding “Author’s Note” of “White,” she writes about rebuilding oneself despite devastation. “When I realized that person is my sister, that only by lending my life and body could I give life to that woman, I began writing this book.”
She articulated her wish: “I wanted to lend my life to my sister, to the infant, to that woman. Because I wanted to provide that woman with a living body filled with warm blood, I had to embrace in every moment the fact that we are alive together with warm bodies.”
Aside from the profound impact of her sister’s absence, Han’s experience with pain has granted her a deeper understanding of what it means to be alive. From her teenage years, she has suffered from debilitating migraines, which she vividly describes as moments in time dropping away like beads made from razor blades, cutting through her fingertips suggesting that blood may flow. “Every breath allows me to deeply appreciate the fact that I am alive.”
Despite her ongoing struggles with migraines, Han reflects, “My migraines always remind me that I am human. When they strike, I must pause my work, my reading, and daily activities; they humble me and make me aware of my own frailty. Perhaps if I were 100% healthy and full of energy, I wouldn’t have become a writer.”
It was at the age of 14, when her migraines began, that Han decided to pursue writing. “I have always sought answers to fundamental questions. As a reader, I realized that every writer seeks answers, often without conclusions, but they continue to write. So, I thought, why not do that myself?”
She shared that her father was also a novelist, filling their home with books. Among her literary inspirations are South Korean author Lim Chul-woo and the renowned Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky.
