We Do Not Part

[Han Kang’s] empathy for vulnerable, often female, lives is palpable, and reinforced by her metaphorically charged prose … She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in a poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose – Nobel Prize in Literature Committee One of the greatest living writers … She is a voice for women, for truth and, above all, for the power of what literature can be – Eimear McBride Unforgettable … A disquietingly beautiful novel about the impossibility of waking up from the nightmare of history. Hang Kang’s prose, as delicate as footprints in the snow or a palimpsest of shadows, conjures up the specters haunting a nation, a family, a friendship – Hernan Diaz, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Trust A visionary novel about history, trauma, art and its tremendous costs. Han Kang is one of the most powerfully gifted writers in the world. With each work, she transforms her readers, and rewrites the possibilities of the novel as a form – Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies Bold and revelatory, disquieting and subversive, Han’s style is both spare and lyrical * Guardian * A courageous and gifted writer whose work has truly global resonance … [Han Kang’s] writing is nuanced, supple and precise * Irish Times * Han Kang. Behind these two syllables lies a novelist in the image of her latest translated work, We Do Not Part: fine, precise prose, with a poetry that willingly plunges into the fantastic, but sufficiently complex to conceal, beneath its praise of dreams and the imaginary, an implacable depiction of human cruelty * Le Monde *

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.