Light and Thread

The prolific South Korean author is back with her first book since winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 2025. In Light and Thread, Kang recalls a poem she wrote at eight years old in which she imagined that “gold thread” of connection, language. Here she uses that thread to tie together essays and poems, her life and her work, beginning with “Nobel lecture” in which the author discusses her writing process and the myriad questions that drive her work * i Paper, ‘16 books to have on your radar in 2026’ *

Han Kang was born in 1970 in South Korea. In 1993 she made her literary debut as a poet and published her first short story in 1994. She won the Man Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian and was shortlisted for The White Book. In 2024, Han Kang was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life’. Among other major awards and prizes she is the winner of the Prix Medicis Etranger 2023 for the French edition of We Do Not Part. She taught in the department of creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts for eleven years before leaving in 2018 to focus on writing. She is the fifth writer to contribute to the ongoing Future Library project in Oslo, Norway.