We Do Not Part

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

Han Kang is a South Korean novelist and the first Asian woman and Korean author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Kang is widely read in her native Korea but garnered international attention and a Booker Prize for the English translation of her novel The Vegetarian in 2016. Her works are complex and philosophically rich, exploring society, culture, and history on the Korean peninsula. She tackles difficult topics in her work, and We Do Not Part is not her first novel to interrogate the way that political violence and Russian, Chinese, and American foreign policy have shaped Korean life and history.

Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea, to parents whose appreciation for writing and literature deeply impacted their children’s lives. Kang’s father was a novelist, as are both Kang’s older and younger brothers. Kang spent her childhood in Gwangju but moved to Seoul with her family so that her father could pursue writing full-time. Without steady employment, he struggled to make ends meet, and Kang has described her childhood as difficult. She had access to books of all kinds and credits their household library with her lifelong interest in literature, politics, and history.