Han Kang: translators share memories of working with the winner of the Nobel prize in literature

Han Kang, the South Korean winner of the 2024 Nobel prize in literature, made her breakthrough in the English-speaking world with her first translated novel (her third in Korean), The Vegetarian. Published in English in 2015, it was an immediate success, making the Evening Standard bestseller list. It went on to win the Man Booker international prize the following year for Han and her young English translator, Deborah Smith.

In the summer of 2015, Han spent a week at the University of East Anglia (UEA) where she was the resident author for the Korean-English literary translation workshop at the annual summer school of the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT). She was already a prize-winning writer in Korea and had recently published the controversial novel that Smith would go on to translate as Human Acts.

As part of the summer school in July 2015, Deborah Smith led a workshop with Han for six emerging translators of Korean, sponsored by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Han later commented that the event as a whole was “on a larger scale and more intensive than any other translation program I had previously heard about or experienced”.

It was already clear that Han was a major figure, and the power of her writing was reinforced by the quiet authority of her presence. For workshop participant Roxanne Edmunds: “The great thing about the workshops was that we were able to work on the translation with the author. It was a little intimidating at first, but Han put us at ease with her enthusiasm.”

Fellow participant (and subsequently Korea Times translation prizewinner) Sophie Bowman told me:

I remember that in the workshop we spent an hour or so moving around a comma, adding it to the sentence, taking it out. And spent a long time discussing the colour and feel and look of a cardigan one of the characters wore and how it signified. I was quite amazed at how we could do this in all seriousness – labouring over such details (not even there on the page), when I had been working until then on tight deadlines and weekly translation quotas. But Han’s work stood up to that scrutiny and expansive kind of reading.

Victoria Caudle, another of the workshop participants and now a doctoral candidate at UCLA, added:

Working with Han, I experienced a writer who respected translation as its own process of writing. She was fascinated by how we would agonise over how to express the slightest movement or smallest image in the text. Overall, I remember how generous she was, how softly she spoke and how strong her words were.

After a week of intensive discussion, the group produced a translated extract from Han’s short story Europa that was barely a page in length, but the value of such activities always lies at least as much in the process as in the product.

The workshop culminated in a joint reading of the translated text as part of the Summer School’s finale at Dragon Hall in Norwich, the beautiful medieval home of BCLT’s partner the National Centre for Writing.

Bowman and Caudle went on to found the Smoking Tigers, a Korean-English literary translator collective, together with several other alumni. Buoyed by the success of her translation of The Vegetarian, Smith founded Tilted Axis Press, which in turn won the International Booker prize in 2022 for Tomb of Sand, written by Geetanjali Shree and translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell.

In response to Han’s Nobel win, the president of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, Sooyoung Chon, remarked: “Han Kang’s Nobel prize in literature is a pivotal moment that highlights LTI Korea’s efforts to introduce Korean literature to the world.” BCLT has continued to collaborate closely with LTI Korea on several other summer school workshops, but the inaugural 2015 edition has proved particularly consequential.

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Duncan Large works for the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, which received funding from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea for its 2015 Summer School.