MORE than a million copies of books by Han Kang, the first South Korean to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, have sold locally since the honour was announced, bookstores said Wednesday.
The short story writer and novelist is best known overseas for her Man Booker Prize-winning “The Vegetarian”, her first novel translated into English.
The 53-year-old, who also became the first Asian woman author to win the Nobel, was chosen “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”, the Swedish Academy said last week.
Han’s win has created a sensation in South Korea, with the websites of major bookstores and publishing houses crashing after it was announced, as tens of thousands rushed to order her books.
“Han Kang’s books are experiencing unprecedented sales. This is a situation we have never seen before,” Kyobo spokesperson Kim Hyun-jung told AFP.
Online bookstore Aladin said Han’s victory had not only led to a staggering 1,200-fold increase in the sales of her books compared with the same period last year, but dramatically boosted the sales of South Korean literature as a whole.
Since her win, “the overall sales of Korean literature increased by more than 12 times compared to the previous year”, it said in a statement.
Sales of two books Han recently mentioned she was reading — “Inventory of Losses” by Judith Schalansky and “Atlas de botanique élémentaire” by Jean-Jacques Rousseau — had also surged, Aladin said.
Kyobo Book Centre said while it does not have exact figures, Han’s books had seen dramatically higher sales compared with other Nobel prize winners.
“We have been in the publishing industry for a while, but this whole situation feels very surreal even to some of us,” a Kyobo employee told AFP.
South Koreans have been overjoyed by the news, with Han’s alma mater, Seoul’s Yonsei University, displaying banners that read: “Congratulations to the proud Yonsei alumnus, Han Kang, on winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.”
In her hometown of Gwangju — where a massacre occurred in 1980 that later inspired Han’s acclaimed novel “Human Acts” — a congratulatory banner was hung on a building fired on by a military helicopter at the time.
