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Nobel winner Han Kang's latest book 'Light and Thread' to hit shelves Thursday

Published: 23 Apr. 2025, 14:08

Author Han Kang speaks to reporters at Stockholm on Dec. 6, 2024. [NEWS1]

Nobel Prize-winning author Han Kang’s upcoming book, “Light and Thread,” was revealed to the media on Tuesday by its publisher, Moonji Publishing.

The collection of essays and poems, set to hit shelves on Thursday, began preorders on Wednesday.

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The title is taken from the Nobel lecture Han delivered in Stockholm in December 2024, ahead of the award ceremony for her Nobel Prize in Literature.

The collection brings together six essays and six poems written between 2013 and 2024. Among them, three pieces are previously unpublished: the essay “North-Facing Garden” (2022), a meditation on plants growing in the shaded garden of Han’s home; “Garden Diary” (2021-23), a collection of short entries written after she purchased her first home and began cultivating a small 4-pyeong (142-square-foot) garden; and the poem “After Living More” (2023), a reflection on her lifelong devotion to writing. All three were written before Han received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Cover for ″Light and Thread″ by Han Kang [MOONJI PUBLISHING]

Roughly 99 percent of the previously unpublished material centers on plants. In them, Han documents her everyday rituals as a devoted caretaker — or “plant butler” — who installed eight tabletop mirrors in her shaded yard to redirect sunlight toward struggling plants. She rotated the angle of the mirrors every 15 minutes and changed their position every three days.

“I have gradually sensed over the past three years that this work is fundamentally altering my traits,” Han writes. “As this small place embraces me in silence with its gentleness. Each day, each moment, with the shifting rhythm of light across the seasons.”

The essays include photos of plants taken by Han herself with her mobile phone.

The only never-before published poem in the collection, “After Living More,” expresses Han’s sense of vocation as a writer past the age of 50. To her, writing is “an act of embracing life tightly,” and “an act of living it fully.”

The new poem roughly translates to the following: “After living more / In the moment before death, is this what I could think? / I embraced life tightly. / (Through writing.) / I met people. / Deeply. Intensely. / (Through writing.) / I lived enough. (Through writing.) / Sunlight. I gazed at the sunlight for a long time."

Alongside the new material, the book includes Han’s Nobel lecture “Light and Thread,” the Nobel acceptance speech and a short reflection on the teacup she donated to the Nobel Prize Museum.

Five other poems previously published in Korean literary journals between 2021 and 2024 also appear in the collection.

The final page features a love poem handwritten by Han at age eight — a photograph of the original manuscript. Forty-five years later, lines from this poem were included in her Nobel lecture, which resonated with audiences around the world: “Where is love? / It is inside my thump-thumping beating chest. / What is love? / It is the gold thread connecting between our hearts.”

Meanwhile, to mark World Book Day on April 23, online bookstore Yes24 announced its list of best-selling books over the past decade. Han’s novel “Human Acts” (2014) topped the list, followed by “The Vegetarian” (2007) in sixth place and “We Do Not Part” (2021) in seventh.

Translated from the JoongAng Ilbo using generative AI and edited by Korea JoongAng Daily staff.
BY HONG JI-YU [[email protected]]