In her first book written since being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2024, Han Kang returns with her first work of nonfiction to be translated into English, jointly translated by Maya West, e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. The book opens with her 2024 Nobel Lecture, where readers both familiar with and curious about her past works are treated to an inside look at Han’s writing process for each book, and the questions that she would ‘endure… [and] live inside’ while writing them. For The Vegetarian these included: ‘Can a person ever be completely innocent? To what depths can we reject violence?’, and for her latest novel, We Do Not Part: ‘To what degree must we love in order to remain human in the end?’

She then goes further, following the thread of questions back in time to a poem she wrote at eight years old, when she asked, ‘Where is love? What is love?’, and then, at age 12, upon finding photographs of the residents of her native Gwangju killed in the 1980 military crackdown on pro-democracy protests (which would later become the focus of Human Acts): ‘Is this the act of one human towards another?’

In order to reconcile the horrors of what we know about the world with what we love about it, Han’s way of moving forward is by believing that we are connected, and, through her writing, pursuing this connection ‘as if [she is] sending out an electric current’. Anyone who has read Han before will understand that her unique, visceral precision is the result of this pursuit.

In the midst of writing We Do Not Part, Han picks up gardening, tending to her house’s small courtyard, recording the incremental changes her plants go through over the years, and their subsequent effect on her own sense of self. There’s a beautiful humility and gentleness to this book, qualities I think readers will find much solace in, as they share in Han’s simultaneous wonder and terror at the state of our world.