To mark the opening of the Harbour Front Literature Festival, one of the most exciting authors in the world today will be coming to Hamburg for the first time: the South Korean Nobel Prize winner Han Kang. She received the prize for her body of work as a whole, but certainly also for her global bestseller »The Vegetarian«. The novel tells the story of the breakdown of an entirely ordinary woman who first stops eating meat and eventually stops eating altogether—until she tries to live only on sunlight, like a plant performing photosynthesis. And she wants to become a plant herself…
Please note: The event will be held in Korean with German translation.
What lies behind this? »Weird Girl Fiction« is the name given to a global literary trend in which women refuse to submit to the merciless role expectations imposed on them and instead create their own world with their own rules.
In her new book, Han Kang approaches further fundamental questions of our existence with the clarity of someone who has not yet forgotten how to look at life in a deeply essential way: Why is the world permeated by violence? How can it at the same time be so beautiful? In numerous texts, the Nobel laureate circles around these questions in search of something beyond violence—something gentle, luminous, that connects us to one another.
In a poem she wrote as a young girl and rediscovered many years later in a shoebox, she imagines a »golden thread«. This thread, she writes, is nothing other than literature itself: a language capable of linking our separate inner worlds. Something that perhaps otherwise only love can do—a »golden thread« that can connect people’s hearts.
But Han Kang means even more by love: in diary entries, she describes her small, north-facing garden in Seoul, where she has set up mirrors. As the earth rotates on its axis, she readjusts the mirrors hour by hour to provide the garden, its flowers and plants, with light and life. »The Golden Thread« is an intimate book, an opportunity to encounter the inner and outer worlds of this great artist—a key to her work.
Han Kang (*1970) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024. She became widely known through her global bestseller »The Vegetarian« (published in German in 2016). Other important works include »White« (published in German in 2020) and »Impossible Farewell« (published in German in 2024).
PERFORMERS
Han Kang reading
Jan Ehlert moderation
