Spring has finally arrived with us,
The wonder of awakening pink life

To imagine hope while living,
Han River's records of that long and deep love

With the reason for selection as “powerful and poetic prose that confronts historical trauma head-on and reveals the fragility of human life,” the new work “Light and Thread” (2025) by Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, has been published as the ninth book in the Munhak-kwa-Jiseongsa prose series “Munji Ecri.”
A total of twelve pieces of writing, including the Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech, “Light and Thread” (2024), unpublished poetry and prose, and a diary written after the author acquired his first proper home, a “north-facing room” and a “garden,” are bound together with photographs also taken by the author.


For over thirty years, as a writer, the author has driven his writing by the “tension and internal struggle between the two questions: ‘Why is the world so violent and painful? And how can the world be so beautiful at the same time?’” The author, who has been the identity of a “writer” for over thirty years, asks and answers whether the “deepest layer” of those countless questions has “always been directed toward love,” and whether that is “the oldest and most fundamental overtone of my life” (p. 29). The poems, prose, diaries, and photographs written over time have found their new place.
While reading and writing “The North-Facing Person” (“The North-Facing Room”), the author’s small but earnest daily life of taking root in a garden that doesn’t receive much light all day long, and of shifting the direction of several table mirrors to capture sunlight, naturally brings to mind the following passage.
“Literature that persistently imagines the first-person perspectives of the people and creatures who inhabit this planet, that deals with the language that ultimately connects us, is inevitably imbued with warmth.” (p. 34)

“Writing just pushed me towards life,” the author said (p. 57).
Turning the pages, the black and white intersect, and the text and images that touch each other seep into and attract each other, leading the reader to follow the light and shadows that fill the author's room and garden, and the author's days and nights that follow.
Love that began in a saddle-bound notebook containing childhood memories from over forty years ago, questions and longings for a warm life, and more recently, “those vivid sensations” of “seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling softness, warmth, coldness, and pain” in a north-facing room and garden from 2020 to 2024, engulfed in the COVID-19 pandemic, are all contained in the diary and prose.
“There is a transparent light green color that appears when sunlight passes through the leaves.
There's a unique feeling I get every time I see it.
“It is a sense of joy that feels almost primal, something that is probably engraved in the genes of humans who have lived in symbiosis with plants.” (North-facing Garden, p. 95)

Here, when Han Kang's language of "poetic prose" meets the form of "boundary-free writing," the world we encounter is filled with the wonders of life and dazzling light.

“As a mortal being with a warm, flowing body, I try to infuse the vivid sensations I feel into sentences like an electric current, and I am surprised and moved when I feel that electric current being transmitted to the readers.
“The moment I realized that language is the thread that connects us, that my questions are connected to that thread through which the light and electricity of life flow.”
--- From "Light and Thread (2024)"

"If I've been given life as a bonus, shouldn't that life now be empowered? Shouldn't I use the things that speak of life while I still have it? [......]
If permitted, I would like my next novel to begin with this feeling.”
--- From "After Publication (2022)"

“Now I can say that I know a little about sunlight.

Built in a small ㄷ shape, this house has no east-facing windows to the outside.
But there is a small library overlooking the inner courtyard.
The sunlight first illuminates the small window, then the inside of the front door, and then the kitchen window.
“I am always amazed by the decisive speed with which the light of the slanting sun finally fills the veranda.”

“Over the past three years, I have gradually realized that this work is fundamentally changing my character.
While the gentleness of this small place embraces me in silence.
“With the rhythm of light that changes every day, every moment, every season.”
--- From "North-facing Garden (2022)"

“There is no outside world in the scenery of my little house.
The peace that the courtyard gives.
A yard like an inner landscape.

There are no pedestrians, no streets, no moments of chance.
To keep from forgetting that, you have to go out the front door often.


But even this introverted home has a side that is open to the outside.
The sky in the yard.
“I was watching the snow falling from the sky for a long time.”
--- From "Garden Diary (December 18, 2021)"

Where is love?
It's in my heart that's beating fast.

What is love?
It is the golden thread that connects our hearts.
--- From "April 1979, Heavy Metal Bound Booklet"

Isn't it weird?
People we've never met before make us thicker.

Aren't you scared?
The layers of space and time we have never passed through weigh us down.

Is there any hope?
I ask you

As long as we live, we cannot help but imagine hope.

If you can call that hope, then there is hope.
--- From "Sound(s) (2024)"

What was it like living in a bright room?
I don't remember
I have no intention of going back

Because I became a person facing the north

The light does not change

--- From "The North-Facing Room (written in 2023 and published in Literature and Society in 2024)"