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The South Korean author Han Kang was, before 2007, relatively unknown to English audiences. That year and to great acclaim, she published The Vegetarian, a novel that explored the brutality of patriarchy and the struggle for self-determination through a family’s refusal of a woman’s decision to stop eating meat. In subsequent years, her oeuvre has grown, as has the scope of her storytelling, expanding from the individual to the societal. In Greek Lessons (2011), she delved into isolation and intimacy via the bond between a woman who has lost her voice and a man losing his sight. In The White Book (2016), she delivered a stirring meditation on loss and grief. In Human Acts (2014) and We Do Not Part (2021), she told haunting tales of generational trauma and military massacre; of a people so scarred by the events of their own past that “for a long time, it was taboo in Korean society to speak of them out loud.” When she was recognized with the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, it was perhaps to some degree thanks to her ever-widening lens.
Now Light and Thread—Han’s first work of nonfiction published in English—fuses the personal with the communal, presenting her Nobel lecture before weaving through poem, essay, and diary to provide rare glimpses into the author’s writing room and garden, in both a literal and spiritual sense. The book serves as something of an addendum to the author’s work, laying bare the themes and matters she’s previously cloaked in story, and revealing something of the hidden, interior place where her ideas germinate.
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Vogue spoke with Han about the tenacity necessary to break cycles of violence and how “sensing and imagining” offer a remedy for despair. The interview was conducted with the help of a translator.
Vogue: In Light and Thread you note that while you still write poetry, novels have a special pull for you. Why is that?
Han Kang: I write poems occasionally when they occur to me, but novels take me years of work harboring questions and fumbling around, pushing onward through sheer will.
“After Publication” explores the agony and the ecstasy of literary creation. What are the most difficult and exciting aspects of it to you?
As I wrote that essay, I was able to look deep into my writing process and the things I go through after I finish a novel. I am always a different person before and after I write a novel. Fortunately, I feel that I’m a better person afterward than I was before.
When I write, I’m a person on a walk. I often get lost, but I try to keep holding the writing tight and moving forward. There are difficulties, of course, but there are also moments of delight when I suddenly find my way. I feel that writing is the sum of all those experiences.
Throughout the book, perhaps most noticeably in “Small Teacup,” you meditate on the small, everyday aspects of life that go into a creative routine. What is your routine like?
To be honest, a routine that intense is only possible when I’m in the middle of writing. During such a period, I keep coming back to my desk again and again whenever I can. But when I’m not in the middle of writing, I live loosely, without a routine. Actually, when I look back on my life, I’ve spent far more of my life that way.
What is the connection between gardening and writing?
As I was putting together this book, I hoped that the entire book would be wrapped in light. So I chose parts from my diaries about tending my garden. My garden is very small, and it doesn’t get enough sunlight because it faces north. To give the plants light, I place mirrors on the ground and move them along the arc of the Sun. I hoped this image would echo the light in Light and Thread.
In your Nobel speech you asked, “To what depths can we reject violence?” With all the violence in the world today, do you think it’s possible to reject it?
I am always surprised that even in hopeless situations there are people who try to stand in opposition to violence. I don’t want to forget that human beings have that strength within them.
What is something you would like to see done in the world to end the cycles of violence?
In my most recent novel, We Do Not Part, there are the ones who have resolved not to bid farewell [to the dead]. Instead of the impossible farewell, they choose to stay within tenacious mourning. They light candles in the pitch black of the night. I still hope to believe in the blinking light which we have in us, and move forward, holding it with tenacity, hopefully.
We Do Not Part is about the Jeju Massacre of 1948, when the South Korean military murdered tens of thousands to repress protests and a resultant uprising on the island of Jeju. Where did the ideas for the book come from?
After publishing Human Acts [about a similar massacre in 1980], I had a dream. I was walking across a snowy field, full of black trees with their tops cut off. There were tens of thousands of graves with those trees as tombstones. Suddenly, the sea flooded in from the other side of the field and rose up to my ankles. I didn’t know how to move the bones in the graves to a safe place, so I ran through the water, then woke up. The record of that dream is the first two pages of We Do Not Part. I wrote the rest of the novel by fumbling around for what would come after those pages.
Today in 2026, what do you think we should learn from the state violence in South Korea’s past?
Hatred, exclusion, and attempts at annihilation are intimately connected. They are human acts that have repeated themselves over the world’s long history. The reason we should examine, question, and oppose them is that they can always recur.
Why do you think The Vegetarian resonated with readers so strongly?
The book layers rejection of violence, despair over being human, and women’s silent screams. And that’s also a reflection of us living in this world.
In 2019 you noted that Human Acts—which tells the story of the Gwangju Uprising through the perspective of a survivor, writer, and ghost—was your most cherished work. Do you still feel that way? What about it is so special?
The time I spent writing Human Acts was relatively short, at a year and a half, but it was dense. It was also an experience that fundamentally transformed me. Human Acts and We Do Not Part are connected, and the process of writing those two novels took around nine years total. This process was intense. However, my other novels are also important to me. It’s hard for me to say which one I love the most.
What is the role of the novelist and the value of the novel—or of the artist and art in general—in times of such great difficulty?
Literature imagines. And very vividly, at that. I feel that the power of that vividness is especially necessary in times like these. Of course, feeling vividly is more painful than not feeling at all. But I think we have to hold that pain close and keep sensing and imagining. Because literature and art are doing that work at every moment, because they infect everyone who reads, hears, and sees them with sensitivity, and make them take the side of life, they are neither useless nor supplementary, but necessary.
What are your greatest hopes and fears for the future?
As long as we’re alive, we need hope. I believe that, rather than a big, vague optimism, if we can nurture a hope that is sincere even if fragile, without extinguishing it, we can avoid giving into despair.