"I will die thinking about the next book to write". After the Nobel, Kang hopes his life "don’t change too much"

The greatest hope of Han Kang the first South Korean to win the Nobel Prize for Literature? May your daily life not change too much after the award. The writer – known abroad above all for ‘The Vegetarian winner of the Man Booker Prize, her first novel translated into English – was chosen “for its intense poetic prose that addresses historical trauma (as in ‘Human Acts’, ed.) and exposes the fragility of human life”. Winning the Nobel was “a moment of joy and gratitude, and that evening I celebrated in silence,” he said at an awards ceremony in Seoul.

Han’s victory created sensation in South Korea with the websites of major bookstores and publishing houses crashing after the announcement, while tens of thousands of people rushed to order his books. “I will remember this past week, filled with so many people who shared my joy as if it were their own, as a special and touching experience.”

“I hope my life doesn’t change too much”

Within a week of the Nobel announcement, more than one million copies had been sold, including e-books with bookstores registering “unprecedented” sales of South Korean literature as a whole. “I hope and believe that my daily life will not change too much,” Kang said, according to AFP. “I am a person who connects to the world through writing and I hope to continue writing and meeting readers through my books, just as I have always done.” “I don’t drink alcohol. I recently stopped drinking caffeine for health reasons. I rarely travel, which I once enjoyed. I’m often asked, ‘What do you enjoy most in life?’ I like walking.”

Kang revealed he is working on the final pages of a novel he began in the spring, which he hopes will be ready for release in 2025. “But because I often don’t time my writing well, I can’t give a certain answer as to when it will be completed.” , he added. He has three more books in mind to write, he said, and hopes to dedicate the next six years of his life to them. “However, just as it always has been, I suspect that as I write these, I will come up with ideas for other books and I will never stop thinking about the books I want to write,” he said. “This makes me fear that I won’t even be able to die properly, always obsessed with the thought of the next three books I want to write.”