Author Guide · Lisanne Swart
Books Written by Han Kang
Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first South Korean author and first Asian woman to do so, “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” Her novels move between the body, violence, dissociation, and grief with an unusual physical directness — a woman who stops eating meat and starts believing she is becoming a tree; a massacre remembered through the people who survived it; a woman who loses the ability to speak. This page covers the five of her books currently available in English translation.
By Lisanne Swart · 5 books in English · Literary Fiction · Nobel Prize 2024 · Updated August 2026 · ~7 min read
Quick answer
Han Kang has five books available in English translation: The Vegetarian (Korean 2007, English 2015), Human Acts (2014/2016), The White Book (2016/2017), Greek Lessons (2011/2023), and We Do Not Part (2021/2025). She won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature. Start with The Vegetarian, her International Booker Prize-winning breakthrough.
Key facts
- Born: November 27, 1970, Gwangju, South Korea
- Nobel Prize in Literature: 2024, first South Korean and first Asian woman to win
- International Booker Prize: 2016, for The Vegetarian
- Books in English translation: 5, published 2015–2025
- Recurring theme: Historical trauma, the body, dissociation, and violence, most directly in Human Acts, about the 1980 Gwangju Uprising
Why trust this list: Every book below is one I’ve read in full. Curated by Lisanne Swart.
In this guide
The Vegetarian
Yeong-hye, an ordinary Seoul housewife, wakes from a violent dream and decides to stop eating meat — a small refusal that her husband, family, and society interpret as escalating madness, while she becomes increasingly convinced she is turning into a tree. Told in three parts, each from a different family member’s perspective, none of them hers.
Her international breakthrough, and the novel that won the 2016 International Booker Prize. Its central refusal — a woman’s quiet, escalating withdrawal from a body and a life that were never fully hers — is the clearest entry point into everything Han Kang does.
Human Acts
Set during and after the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, in which the South Korean military killed hundreds of unarmed students and civilians in Han’s own hometown, the novel follows multiple survivors and the dead across decades, using the massacre as a lens on collective memory, guilt, and what a body does when it witnesses atrocity.
Her most directly political novel, grounded in a real historical event she narrowly avoided witnessing herself — her family left Gwangju four months before the massacre. The most essential entry point for understanding the historical trauma the Nobel committee specifically cited.
The White Book
A fragmented, poetic meditation structured around a list of white things — swaddling bands, snow, a shroud — connected to the narrator’s grief for an older sister who died two hours after birth, before the narrator herself was born.
Her most formally experimental book on this list, closer to prose poetry than conventional narrative. Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2018.
Greek Lessons
A woman who has lost the ability to speak, following a series of traumas, begins studying Ancient Greek with a teacher who is himself slowly losing his eyesight. A fragile connection develops between two people each losing a different capacity for perceiving and being understood by the world.
Quieter and more intimate than her historical-trauma novels, and one of the clearest examples of her recurring interest in language, embodiment, and what happens when either fails.
We Do Not Part
A woman travels to a remote island to save her friend’s pet bird, and finds herself drawn into her friend’s family history connected to another mass killing in Korea’s twentieth century — the Jeju uprising and massacre of 1948–49, a historical trauma even less widely known internationally than Gwangju.
Her most recent novel available in English, extending the historical-trauma project of Human Acts to an earlier, even less internationally known atrocity, published in English the year after her Nobel Prize win.
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