Nobel Laureate Author Han Kang’s “New” Book Is One That No One Will Get To Read
Both Korean and global interest continues to grow in South Korean novelist Han Kang and her works after she was announced as the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Awarded for her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,” Han Kang is the 18th woman and the first South Korean writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature—second overall after the late President Kim Dae Jung, who won the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize.
Some of her most popular works include The Vegetarian and Human Acts: A Novel. But her most anticipated is, perhaps, the one buried somewhere in a Norwegian forest.
Back in 2019, according to The Guardian, Han Kang was chosen as one of the novelists (alongside Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell) to contribute to the Scottish artist Katie Paterson‘s “Future Library” art project.
Paterson is asking one writer a year to contribute a manuscript on the themes of imagination and time. The manuscripts will be stored in a specially designed room lined with wood from the forest in the new Deichman Library, opening this year in Oslo. In 2114, 100 years after the project’s launch, its curators will cut down the 1,000 Norwegian spruces that were planted in 2014 and print the texts—unseen by anyone until then—for the first time. ‘No adult living today will ever know what is inside the boxes, other than that they are texts that will withstand the ravages of time,’ said the project’s organizers.
— The Guardian
All that is known about Han Kang’s book to be published in 2114 is that it is called Dear Son, My Beloved. Given the “adults living today” are not going to make it to 2114, Han Kang fans are heartbroken, all the while intrigued.
- “Wow… I will definitely not be around to read that.”
- “I’m 126 years old in 2114. Not going to happen, LOL. One of you, please make it.”
- “But why…? Please let us read it…”
- “Will I be able hit 115? I don’t think so…”
- “Even Han Kang herself won’t be able to see it be published.”
- “I wonder if humanity will even exist in 2114.”
Listen to Han Kang’s first reactions to her incredible achievement here:
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