Han Kang's writing sheds light on the voices of minorities in South Korea and beyond.

South Korean author Han Kang recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 2024, often considered the most prestigious award in the world. She became the first Asian woman and Korean writer ever to win the prize for "intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life," as the Swedish Academy described.

Since its foundation in 1901, there have only been five Asian and 18 women Nobel Prize in Literature winners out of 121 individuals. In an interview with the Swedish Academy, Han Kang responded that she was casually having dinner with her son, and she was very "surprised" after she got a call from the Nobel Foundation. The former director of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea also reacted to the news that "It was faster than he expected."

Han Kang was awarded the prize, breaking the glass ceiling surrounding the literature field. Her win highlights the necessity for more female authors and minority groups to be supported in literature so audiences are able to hear diverse voices and their unique perspectives. It's a significant win as well after being censored by her government but later being recognized globally.

One of the most notable of the author's works is "The Vegetarian," the winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize for her first English-translated book. It illustrates the struggles of the main character Yeong-hye, living in a Korean patriarchal society and her bizarre journey to reach true freedom by becoming a plant.

"The Vegetarian" also was her first book translated into English. The translator, Deborah Smith, began studying Korean in 2010 after discovering there were few translators for Korean literary works. She started working with Han Kang in 2013, and only after three years became the co-winner of the Man Booker International Prize along with the author. The translation by Deborah Smith is considered essential to Kang's win of the Nobel in Literature, and in an interview, she described the victory as offering "the hope that we are finally moving toward a more equitable literary world, in which identity no longer overshadows merit."

However, due to the sensitive Korean historical events discussed in her books, such as "Human Acts" featuring the uprising suppressed by the Korean military government in her hometown, Gwangju, she once was blacklisted during Park Geun-hye's presidency by the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism directed by the president. Her book was excluded from governmental programs for ideological bias and distortion of history.

Therefore, when "The Vegetarian" received the Man Booker Award, a renowned literary award, there was no message of celebration sent to her from the president when individuals made great achievements in Korea. Facing censorship is not the only barrier she has crossed but in the greater literary world, gender and ethnicity are one of the components of writers, which sometimes lead their works to be overlooked.

Prestigious awards often have a basis in the Western world, and their committees have often been criticized for the lack of diversity of recipients and inevitable systematic bias. An analysis by Nicola Griffith, a female author who has won multiple literature prizes, showed that The Pulitzer Award by Columbia University in the United States awarded zero books written entirely from a woman's point of view between 2000 and 2015. Other prominent literature prizes, such as the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award, show similar trends.

She wrote in her blog, "It's hard to escape the conclusion that when it comes to literary prizes, the more prestigious, influential and financially remunerative the award, the less likely the winner is to write about grown women."

According to the count of VIDA Women in Literary Arts survey: Women in Literacy Arts in 2016, there is a predominant number of male reviewers at top publications, and a study in 2014 at Brown University found 72% of books reviewed at The New York Times were written by male authors. Literature has also been dominated by Europeans, especially male-authored books, which tend to be reviewed more formally and frequently.

Readers have been shown to prefer to read books written by the same genders as well. Goodreads, an American website for book recommendations, uncovered with their 40,000 users that 90% of top books read by men were written by the same sex, and the result was the same for women, too.

It is even more difficult for Asian authors to get their books reviewed because it is challenging to capture the nuances of cultural differences in translation. For the National Book Award, in 2013, "The Thing About Luck" by Cynthia Kadohata became the first Asian American author to win in a subcategory and Han Kang was the first Asian-woman author who receive the Man Booker International Prize.

As Deborah Smith said to the Korea Times, there is a lack of Asian book translators due to language and writing system complexities, which require profound insight into their languages. In the United States, only 3% of translated books are in the fiction and poetry market, with the great dominance of English books. The most frequently translated languages are French, German, and Spanish, all European languages. For Han Kang, only four of her five novels are currently translated and published, not including some of her short stories and poems.

Her recent achievement reflects a historical step forward in the literature world, which is just beginning to shift toward diversity, inclusivity, and equality for both genders and ethnicities. Global recognition proves that nothing can be an obstacle to distinguishing the beauty of writing. By honoring Han Kang's novels, the Nobel Committee uplifts her work, which conveys experimental topics such as complex forms of violence and the traumas of human lives with serene and succinct narrative styles, evoking deep emotions within readers.

Through literature, Han Kang gives a voice to those in the shadows, covering the silent pains belonging to minorities after overcoming her struggles with censorship, social pressures and language barriers.