The year she turned 23, she made her debut as a poet with poems in the winter issue of the quarterly Literature and Society. The next year, her short story “The Scarlet Anchor” won the Seoul Shinmun New Year literary contest, and she became a fiction writer as well.
In 1995, she published her first story collection, Love in Yeosu. In 1998, she published her first novel, Black Deer, and took part in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. In 1999, she won the Korean Novel Award for the short story “Baby Buddha.”
In 2000, she received Today’s Young Artist Award from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. In 2002, she published the novel Your Cold Hands and her first children’s book, My Name Is Sunflower. Two years later, the novellas “The Vegetarian” and “Mongolian Mark” appeared in magazines. In 2005, “Mongolian Mark” won the Yi Sang Literary Award, as her father Han Seung-won’s work had in 1988.
In 2007, Changbi collected the linked novellas as The Vegetarian, and she became a professor of creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. In 2010, she won the Dongri Literary Prize for the novel The Wind Blows, Go. The next year she published the novel Greek Lessons. In 2013, she published her first poetry collection, I Put the Evening in the Drawer.
In 2014, she published Human Acts, about Gwangju in May 1980, and won the Manhae Literary Prize. In 2015, she won the Hwang Sun-won Literary Award for the short story “While One Snowflake Melts.”
The breakthrough yearThe year she turned 46, the English edition of The Vegetarian won the Man Booker International Prize, 22 years after her fiction debut.
In 2017, Human Acts won the Malaparte Prize in Italy. In 2018, The White Book was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, and she opened the independent bookshop Bookshop Oneul. In 2019, she received the Inchon Prize in the Media and Culture category. In 2021, she published We Do Not Part, a novel about the Jeju April 3 uprising.
In 2022, We Do Not Part won the Daesan Literary Award and the Kim Man-jung Literary Prize. In 2023, the same book won the Prix Médicis étranger in France. The year she turned 54, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Korean writer to do so. In 2025, she published Light and Thread, an essay collection named for her Nobel lecture. In 2026, the English edition of We Do Not Part won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Han Kang (born Nov 27, 1970) made her debut as a poet in 1993, the year she turned 23, in the quarterly Literature and Society, and became a fiction writer the next year through the Seoul Shinmun New Year literary contest. She became known on May 16, 2016, the year she turned 46, when The Vegetarian won the Man Booker International Prize, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature on Oct 10, 2024, the year she turned 54.
Ages are by calendar year (the year minus the birth year), birthdays aside.