This year's Man Booker International Prize laureate Han Kang was born in the southern city of Gwangju in November 1970 and moved to Seoul at the age of ten. She graduated from Pungmoon Girls’ High School and then Yonsei University with a degree in Korean literature. She has been teaching at the Seoul Institute of the Arts since 2007.
 
Han's writing career took off when one of her poems was published in the winter issue of the quarterly literary magazine “Literature and Society” in 1993. In the following year, she made her official literary debut when her short story “The Scarlet Anchor” was selected as a winning entry in the annual spring literary contest of the Seoul Shinmun newspaper.
 
Han is a prolific writer who has produced various novels, a collection of poems and a children’s book. Other novels of hers include "The Black Deer" in 1998, "Your Cold Hand" in 2002, and "Human Acts."

Han won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize for the novel “The Vegetarian,” which first appeared in the quarterly literary magazine “Changbi” or “Creation and Criticism” in 2004. The novel was published as a book in 2007.

The last novel Han released is “A Boy is Coming,” which is being critically acclaimed overseas along with “The Vegetarian.”

Her father is veteran novelist Han Seung-won, who is known for his works searching for the beauty of traditional Korean culture, including “Aje Aje Bara Aje." 
 
Han and her father are both the winners of the Yi Sang Literary Prize, one of South Korea’s prestigious literary awards.