I believe that trauma is something to be embraced rather than healed or recovered from. I believe that grief is something which situates the place/sp… - Han Kang

Humans will not hesitate to lay down their own lives to rescue a child who had fallen onto the train tracks, yet are also perpetrators of appalling violence, like in Auschwitz. The broad spectrum of humanity, which runs from the sublime to the brutal, has for me been like a difficult homework problem ever since I was a child. You could say that my books are variations on this theme of human violence.

Writing is a way of questioning for me. I don’t try to find an answer, but to complete the question, or to stay within the question as long as I can. In a sense, writing fiction can be compared with pacing back and forth. You go forward and then come back again, pondering questions that both sears and chills you internally.

I don’t see a single concept of ‘national’ or ‘literature’. Rather, I’ve always been fascinated by language. I enjoy contemplating the great depth, complexity and delicacy of the layers of a culture in which a single language is in-built. I owe a great debt to poetry and fiction written in Korean, as I spent my adolescence immersed within these.