‘Each time I work on a novel, I endure the questions, I live inside them’: Han Kang’s Nobel lecture

Light and Thread

Last January, while sorting through my storeroom ahead of an imminent move, I came across an old shoe box. I opened the box to find several diaries dating back to my childhood. Among the stack of journals, there was a pamphlet, the words “A Book of Poems” written in pencil across its front. The booklet was thin: five sheets of rough A5 paper folded in half and bound with staples. I had added two zigzagging lines under the title, one line progressing up in six steps from the left, the other inclining down in seven steps to the right. Was it a kind of cover illustration? Or simply a doodle? The year – 1979 – and my name were written on the back of the chapbook, with a total of eight poems inscribed on the inner leaves by the same neat, pencilled hand as on the front and back covers. Eight different dates marked the bottom of each page in chronological order. 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...

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