Did South Koreans only discover the books of their compatriot Han Kang after she won the Nobel Prize for Literature? In any case, his novels have sold more than a million copies locally since last week, three large bookstores in the “Land of Fresh Mornings” told AFP on Wednesday October 16, 2024.
“Han Kang’s books are enjoying unprecedented sales. This is a situation that we have never seen before,” Kim Hyun-jung, spokesperson for Kyobo, the country’s largest bookstore chain, told AFP.
“Historical trauma and fragility of human life”
The first Asian woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, the 53-year-old novelist was rewarded on Thursday October 10, 2024, for “her intense poetic prose which confronts historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life”.
She is best known abroad for her novel The Vegetarianwhich won the Man Booker Prize in 2016 and which tells the story of a woman’s radical change in eating habits after violent nightmares… with disastrous consequences on her married life and her mental health.
Explosion in demand
According to the brand specializing in the sale of new and used books Aladin, Han Kang’s Nobel has increased the sales of its own books by 1,200 compared to the same period last year, and southern literature by 12 -Korean “as a whole”.
Our “Nobel Prize for Literature” file
Local media report that some South Korean printing companies have had to run at full capacity, especially during weekends, to meet growing demand: “I have never been this busy since I joined the company, in 2006,” an Aladin employee confirmed to AFP.
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