Why Did Han Kang Win the Nobel Prize? (translated from my Chinese essay)
Why Did Han Kang Win the Nobel Prize? Yilin Zhong Ever since Amazon discontinued the Kindle eBook service in China, I’ve been unable to access Chinese books published locally or translated into Chinese. To date, I've only read two short stories by Han Kang: " The Plant Wife " which she wrote at 27 and later expanded into the Booker Prize-winning novel " The Vegetarian ", and " Middle Voices " published in 2023 in The New Yorker . The reason I’m writing this article, despite having read only these two stories, is that since the announcement of her award, I've seen various discussions and literary reviews in major Chinese media that feel rather off-topic. I want to clarify that while the focus of much of the media is on "The Vegetarian", which earned Han Kang international acclaim, it is not the work that won her the Nobel Prize. Instead, it was her 2014 novel "Human Acts" (translated in Chinese as " 少年来了