Han Kang’s Experimental Touch | The New Yorker

In today’s newsletter, new reporting from Heidi Blake on the Texas doctor who tried to free captive members of the Saudi royal family. But, first, a note about Han Kang, who was just awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. And then:

Han Kang.Photograph by Roberto Ricciuti / Getty

E. Tammy Kim
Contributing writer

This year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Han Kang, is a novelist and poet of tremendous feeling and precision. In works such as “The Vegetarian,” “Human Acts,” “The White Book,” and “Greek Lessons,” she applies a light, often experimental touch to heavy themes: women’s experiences under patriarchal rule; the buried histories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century South Korea.

Han came to the attention of most readers outside South Korea with “The Vegetarian” (translated into English by Deborah Smith), which tells the story of Yeong-hye, a woman in Seoul who responds to a series of gory nightmares (“great blood-red gashes of meat”) by giving up her carnivorous ways and rejecting her husband and extended family. I’m partial to a larger-scale novel, “Human Acts” (also translated by Smith), about a people’s uprising and U.S.-backed massacre, in 1980, in the southern city of Gwangju, where Han spent her early childhood. In an author’s note, she reflects on a grim source of inspiration: a boy, killed in the massacre, whom her father, the writer Han Seung-won, had taught in middle school. “How had the seasons kept on turning for me, when time had stopped forever for him that May?”

Han’s latest novel is “We Do Not Part” (forthcoming in English)—a beautiful, mysterious story built around another historic tragedy, a pogrom on Jeju Island after the Korean War, told from the perspective of three women characters. A few months after it came out, in 2021, I met her for a vegetarian meal in Seoul. (We have known each other for a while.) South Korea was trending authoritarian, increasingly steered by male grievance, which got me thinking about 2016, when Han and Smith won the International Booker Prize for “The Vegetarian.” That same year, a feminist movement took hold in South Korea, #MeToo avant la lettre, and made the literary world its first bit of housecleaning. Ko Un, a poet who’d long been considered South Korea’s most likely winner of a Nobel Prize, was revealed to have been an abuser; no one reads him anymore. Korea’s #MeToo uprising has since shrivelled, but Han and many other women writers—Kyung-sook Shin, Kim Hyesoon, Hwang Jung-eun—are still in their rightful place, defining contemporary Korean literature. Read Han Kang’s short story “The Middle Voice” »

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Editor’s Pick

Illustration by Matt Rota

The Texan Doctor and the Disappeared Saudi Princesses

Four daughters in the royal family were kept drugged and imprisoned for almost two decades. A physician who tried to free them speaks out for the first time.

After their mother fled for London in 2003, the Saudi Princess Hala and three of her sisters were held captive by their father, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. The princesses were plied with tranquilizers, cocaine, amphetamines, and alcohol; they were guarded at all times, abused, and deprived of food and water. Dwight Burdick, the doctor who was tasked with prescribing the legal drugs given to the women, developed a complicated, almost paternal relationship with Hala over many years—and he is haunted to this day by her fate. “I was told over and over that they’ll never be released,” Burdick tells the New Yorker writer Heidi Blake. In extraordinary reporting, Blake shares the story of the imprisoned princesses and the doctor who reluctantly abided by their father’s vengeful dictum. Read the story »

Further reading: Last year, Heidi Blake reported on four other royal women fighting to escape captivity, including Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum, the daughter of Dubai’s ruling emir.

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More Fun & Games

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P.S. Rafael Nadal announced today that he will retire from tennis next month, with twenty-two Grand Slam singles titles notched on his racquet. Earlier this year, Gerald Marzorati reflected on the Spanish star’s farewell tour: “He has brought a distinct temperament to the game, a vehement competitiveness with no trace of anger or rancor; a considerate ferocity,” he noted. “His fervor bound him to tennis, and us to him.” 🎾

An earlier version of this article misstated the title of Han Kang’s forthcoming novel.

Hannah Jocelyn contributed to this edition.