South Korean Nobel laureate Han Kang wins US book critics’ top fiction prize for We Do Not Part

SEOUL – South Korean author Han Kang won the US National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) fiction prize for We Do Not Part, her novel about the 1948 Jeju massacre, organisers said.

The NBCC announced the award at its annual ceremony in New York on March 26.

Published in Korean in 2021, We Do Not Part reached English-language readers in 2025. It is Han’s first novel to come out in an English translation after the 55-year-old became the first Asian woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024.

The novel follows three women grappling with the legacy of the April 3, 1948, Jeju Uprising – a civilian protest against US military-led rule that the government of the time falsely branded a communist revolt, killing tens of thousands.

Han, who could not attend the ceremony, had her acceptance speech read by Mr David Ebershoff, vice-president and editor-in-chief of book publisher Hogarth and executive editor of Random House.

“Thanking everyone who helped me while I wrote this book over seven years,” the speech read.

Han said the novel’s characters “choose to stay within tenacious mourning” rather than accept loss, lighting “candles below the sea”.

“In the pitch-black plunge of the night, I still hope to believe in the blinking light which we have in us, and to move forward, holding it with tenacity,” the speech concluded.

Ms Heather Scott Partington, NBCC’s fiction committee chair, called We Do Not Part “a work of blinding melancholy, bleak weather and murmuring syntax” and “a subtly rendered sketch of trauma in the wake of the Jeju massacre – a rumination on creation and truth amidst loss”.

The NBCC prize extends a remarkable run of international recognition for the novel.

Its French edition, Impossibles Adieux, won the Prix Medicis for foreign literature in 2023 and the Emile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature in 2024. THE KOREA HERALD/ASIA NEWS NETWORK