A flat-lay graphic of Korean books including Greek Lessons by Han Kang, Marigold Mind Laundry by Jungeun Yun, The Trunk by Kim Ryeo-ryeong, The Nine Cloud Dream by Kim Man-Jung, The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories, The Poet by Yi Mun-Yol, The Story of Hong Gildong.

Korean fiction in translation

Reading lists

The best Korean fiction in translation

Greek Lessons

Book of the Year 2023 according to New Yorker, TIME magazine, Kirkus 
 
A powerful novel of the saving grace of language and human connection, from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Vegetarian. 
 
'Breathtaking . . . She is simply my favourite living writer to read, and think with, and see the world with' Max Porter 
 
In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. 
 
Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages. 
 
Greek Lessons is a tender love letter to human connection, a novel to awaken the senses, vividly conjuring the essence of what it means to be alive. 
 
Translated by Deborah Smith and e. yaewon. 
 
Shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2024 
 
'Another stunning gem: quiet, sharply faceted, and devastating' Kirkus 
 
'Han Kang is a writer like no other. In a few lines, she seems to traverse the entirety of human experience' Katie Kitamura

By turns love letter to and critique of language itself, Greek Lessons is a brief yet, in its concision and finesse, lapidary work . . . one of Han's most intimate works

In Greek Lessons Kang reaches beyond the usual senses to translate the unspeakable . . . Han Kang turns the well-worn idea of the mind-body disconnect into something fresh and substantial

This novel is a celebration of the ineffable trust to be found in sharing language . . . [Han] is an astute chronicler of unusual, insubordinate women

Han Kang is a writer like no other. In a few lines, she seems to traverse the entirety of human experience

Han Kang's vivid and at times violent storytelling will wake up even the most jaded of literary palates

An elliptical, enigmatic book . . . Han's style creates mystery

Han Kang's hypnotic Greek Lessons probes the limits of language

Han Kang is what most writers spend their lives trying to be: a fearless, unsentimental teller of human truths . . . Han Kang is a genius

Lisa McInerney, author of The Glorious Heresies

Another stunning gem: quiet, sharply faceted, and devastating

Han Kang was born in 1970 in South Korea. In 1993 she made her literary debut as a poet and was first published as novelist in 1994. Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian and was shortlisted for The White Book, alongside her translator, Deborah Smith. Han has also won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today's Young Artist Award and the Manhae Literary Prize. She taught in the department of creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts for eleven years before leaving in 2018 to focus on writing.

In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. 
 
Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages. 
 
Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish - the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to one another. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity - their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to expression. 
 
Greek Lessons is a tender love letter to human intimacy and connection, a novel to awaken the senses, vividly conjuring the essence of what it means to be alive. 
 
Translated by Deborah Smith and e. yaewon.

Han Kang

e. yaewon

Paige Morris

[Han Kang’s] empathy for vulnerable, often female, lives is palpable, and reinforced by her metaphorically charged prose . . . She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in a poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose

A masterpiece . . . We Do Not Part is both act of witness and a beautiful poetic object . . . It is a rare privilege to read a masterpiece so recently crafted, to know that the new prose you are reading (too fast!) will endure. We Do Not Part is an astonishing book

Han Kang offers a devastating indictment of her country’s past . . . The novel conjures a dreamlike feel amid its potent tales of suffering and cruelty, all leading to a final section that is simply stunning. Han pulls off a masterful meditation on what it’s like to be assaulted by an “endless spew of blood-soaked memories”. In that finale, I was stopped short by the grace of one dazzling page, with its cascade of memorable images. These include a description of mental collapse as hundreds of fuses in one’s head blowing one by one, and a woman sleeping all day in a hospice, who reminds Khungha of “a sea where the high tide lasts forever”. Han ends her magnificent novel on a beautifully beguiling note

With patience and acute insight, [Han Kang] explores both the breadth and brutality of human cruelty, and the profound capacity of our species for tenderness . . . We Do Not Part strikes a match in the darkness, insists on the strength of sisterhood, and makes us believe that even the smallest of lives, the pulse of a bird’s heart, should matter

Han’s work – itself a radical form of outreach and connection, an attempt to feel into the painful lives of strangers – is highly original and moving. Although she refuses to look away from human cruelty, it is her glimmers of hope that are most affecting  . . . There is, perhaps, no novelist working today who seems so devoted to interrogating the epistemic problem of suffering

One of the greatest living writers . . . She is a voice for women, for truth and, above all, for the power of what literature can be

A courageous and gifted writer whose work has truly global resonance . . . [Han Kang’s] writing is nuanced, supple and precise

Bold and revelatory, disquieting and subversive, Han’s style is both spare and lyrical

A chilling reminder of the terrible invisibility of people and events that are removed from us in space and time

Exquisite. Han’s radiant intensity, her singular ability to find connections between body and soul, and to experiment with form and style, are what make her one of the world’s most important writers

A novelist and poet of tremendous feeling and precision . . . We Do Not Part [is] a beautiful, mysterious story built around . . . a pogrom on Jeju Island after the Korean War, told from the perspective of three women characters

A haunting exploration of friendship amid historical trauma

A visionary novel about history, trauma, art and its tremendous costs. Han Kang is one of the most powerfully gifted writers in the world. With each work, she transforms her readers, and rewrites the possibilities of the novel as a form

Unforgettable . . . A disquietingly beautiful novel about the impossibility of waking up from the nightmare of history. Hang Kang’s prose, as delicate as footprints in the snow or a palimpsest of shadows, conjures up the specters haunting a nation, a family, a friendship

It is pain—whether from large-scale acts of violence or quietly self-inflicted wounds—that gives [Han’s] writing its uncomfortable vitality

Han Kang. Behind these two syllables lies a novelist in the image of her latest translated work, We Do Not Part: fine, precise prose, with a poetry that willingly plunges into the fantastic, but sufficiently complex to conceal, beneath its praise of dreams and the imaginary, an implacable depiction of human cruelty

Astonishing . . . [We Do Not Part]is a rewarding endeavor, especially for readers familiar with Han’s oeuvre who can recognize it as a mosaic that artfully pieces together her long-simmering ideas on reckoning with historical atrocities, fighting to expose state-concealed truths and finding connection in our shared humanity despite inevitable suffering

[Kang] draws American readers into foreign calamities that their own forebears had a hand in creating, and then offers a very limited kind of redemption—the chance to discover, for themselves, that legacy of shame

[We Do Not Part] blows open the lid on a long-forgotten chapter of Korean history, celebrating the resiliency of life in the face of immense tragedy

A dream-narrative of history, remembrance, and friendship rendered in [Han’s] complex, lyrical prose

Even through the veil of translation, the quiet intricacy of the author’s prose glitters throughout . . . a mysterious novel about history and friendship [that] offers no easy answers

Vivid, nail-biting . . . written in prose of extraordinary visual and sensory precision, this is a ghost story of uncommon power and literary depth

Beginning one morning in December, We Do Not Part traces the path of Kyungha as she travels from the city of Seoul into the forests of Jeju Island, to the home of her old friend Inseon. Hospitalized following an accident, Inseon has begged Kyungha to hasten there to feed her beloved pet bird, who will otherwise die. 
 
Kyungha takes the first plane to Jeju, but a snowstorm hits the island the moment she arrives, plunging her into a world of white. Beset by icy wind and snow squalls, she wonders if she will arrive in time to save the bird – or even survive the terrible cold which envelops her with every step. As night falls, she struggles her way to Inseon’s house, unaware as yet of the descent into darkness which awaits her. 
 
There, the long-buried story of Inseon’s family surges into light, in dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter, and in a painstakingly assembled archive documenting a terrible massacre on the island seventy years before. 
 
We Do Not Part is a hymn to friendship, a eulogy to the imagination and above all an indictment against forgetting.

Han Kang

Praise for We Do Not Part

[Han Kang’s] empathy for vulnerable, often female, lives is palpable, and reinforced by her metaphorically charged prose . . . She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the ...

A masterpiece . . . We Do Not Part is both act of witness and a beautiful poetic object . . . It is a rare privilege to read a masterpiece so recently crafted, to know that the new prose you are reading (too ...

Han Kang offers a devastating indictment of her country’s past . . . The novel conjures a dreamlike feel amid its potent tales of suffering and cruelty, all leading to a final section that is simply stunning. ...

[Han Kang’s] empathy for vulnerable, often female, lives is palpable, and reinforced by her metaphorically charged prose . . . She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the ...

A masterpiece . . . We Do Not Part is both act of witness and a beautiful poetic object . . . It is a rare privilege to read a masterpiece so recently crafted, to know that the new prose you are reading (too ...

Han Kang offers a devastating indictment of her country’s past . . . The novel conjures a dreamlike feel amid its potent tales of suffering and cruelty, all leading to a final section that is simply stunning. ...

[Han Kang’s] empathy for vulnerable, often female, lives is palpable, and reinforced by her metaphorically charged prose . . . She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the ...

A masterpiece . . . We Do Not Part is both act of witness and a beautiful poetic object . . . It is a rare privilege to read a masterpiece so recently crafted, to know that the new prose you are reading (too ...

Han Kang offers a devastating indictment of her country’s past . . . The novel conjures a dreamlike feel amid its potent tales of suffering and cruelty, all leading to a final section that is simply stunning. ...

Books by Han Kang

Articles featuring Han Kang

The best Korean fiction in translation

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