Han Kang’s translators on their memories of working with the 2024 Nobel Prize winner in Literature
‘Working with Han, I experienced a writer who respected translation as its own process of writing,’ said translator Victoria Caudle.
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Han Kang, the South Korean winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, made her breakthrough in the English-speaking world with her first translated novel (her third in Korean), The Vegetarian. Published in English in 2015, it was an immediate success, making the Evening Standard bestseller list. It went on to win the Man Booker international prize the following year for Han and her young English translator, Deborah Smith.
In the summer of 2015, Han spent a week at the University of East Anglia (UEA) where she was the resident author for the Korean-English literary translation workshop at the annual summer school of the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT). She was already a prize-winning writer in Korea and had recently published the controversial novel that Smith would go on to translate as Human Acts.
As part of the summer school in July 2015, Deborah Smith led a workshop with Han for six emerging translators of Korean, sponsored by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Han later commented that the event as a whole was “on a larger scale and more intensive than any other translation programme I had previously heard about or experienced”.
It was already clear that Han was a major figure, and the power of her writing was reinforced by the quiet authority of her presence. For workshop...
