Han Kang, this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, held a lecture titled Light and Thread at the Nobel Prize ceremony on Saturday, December 7, in Stockholm, Sweden. Passionately addressing the profound questions that drove the creation of her works, she delivered personal anecdotes of her life from the past forty years. 

“The lines penned by my eight-year-old self were suitably innocent and unpolished, but one poem from April caught my eyes. It opened with the following stanzas: 

Where is love? 

It is inside my thump-thumping beating chest. 

What is love? 

It is the gold thread connecting between our hearts. 

In a flash I was transported back forty years, as memories of that afternoon spent putting the pamphlet together came back to me,” she said. 

She reflected on the change she goes through as she “endure[s] the questions” that underlie her works, experiencing the genuine essence of “liv[ing] inside them” during her process of writing. Han said, “I am no longer as I was when I began,” ultimately meeting another self at the end. Going through this transformative process “like links in a chain, or like dominoes, overlapping and continuing,” Han states that she is moved to write something new time and time again. Han delved in chronological order through the questions she endured with each piece of writing, going through concepts of “remaining human”, violence and love, revealing her inner struggles and transformations as a writer. 

Writing The Vegetarian — her third novel — from 2003 to 2005, she dealt with the following  “painful questions”: Can a person ever be completely innocent? To what depths can we reject violence? What happens to one who refuses to belong to the species called human? 

In Greek Lessons, she sought to more deeply explore the  moments that make life bearable amidst its chaos, looking into the fundamental aspects of humanity. The question Han wanted to ask here was this: Could it be that by regarding the softest aspects of humanity, by caressing the irrefutable warmth that resides there, we can go on living after all in this brief, violent world? 

Reflecting on how Human Acts started, Han took the audience back to a time long past. She revisited  her childhood experiences, examining photographs of Gwangju residents and students “killed with clubs, bayonets and guns while resisting the new military powers that had orchestrated the coup.” Despite not understanding the political situation of the time, as a child, Han stated that even then she had a significant question in mind: “Is this the act of one human towards another?” 

During her research for the novel, Han recognized that the questions she had in mind — “Can the present help the past? Can the living save the dead?” — were impossible questions in the first place. After reading diary entries of a young-night school educator, Han came to the conclusion that her two questions had to be reversed — “Can the past help the present? Can the dead save the living?” 

After the publication of Human Acts, it came to her surprise in learning of the pained reactions of her readers to the novel, noting the interconnected relationship she has with them. “I had to take some time to think about how the pain I had felt throughout the writing process and the distress that my readers had expressed to me were connected,” she said. 

Writing We Do Not Part, Han questioned: To what extent can we love? Where is our limit? To what degree must we love in order to remain human to the end? This wondrous and curious attitude of Han continues even after her multiple publications. In the autumn of 2021, after We Do Not Part was published, Han identified two core questions that inspire her novels and her many contemplations:   Why is the world so violent and painful? And yet how can the world be this beautiful? 

As she reexamines the past, Han reflects not only upon her writing career but also on genuine human existence and life. Han also spoke on how she involves all of her senses in her creative process: “When I write, I use my body.” She also recognizes the significance of these senses, giving a profound explanation on how she tries to blow the sensations into her words and sentences. “I use all the sensory details of seeing, of listening, of smelling, of tasting, of experiencing tenderness and warmth and cold and pain, of noticing my heart racing and my body needing food and water, of walking and running, of feeling the wind and rain and snow on my skin, of holding hands,” Han said.

Han concluded the lecture by emphasizing the “thread” that exists amongst people; amongst us readers and herself. She said, “I try to infuse those vivid sensations that I feel as a mortal being with blood coursing through the body into my sentences, as if I am sending out an electric current. And when I sense this current being transmitted to the reader, I am astonished and moved.” 

Perhaps through this electric current, and the “thread of language that connects us,” Han provides us the opportunity to reflect on our own standards of “remaining human.” 

Although the lecture was delivered in Korean, the transcript of the text and translations in English and Swedish are available on the Nobel Prize Website.