Han Kang is a South Korean writer born in Gwangju in 1970. She taught creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts from 2007 to 2018. Han rose to international prominence with her novel The Vegetarian, which became the first Korean language novel to win the International Booker Prize for fiction in 2016. In 2024, Han became the first Asian woman and the first Korean to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel Prize committee recognized her "intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life." This recognition marked a significant milestone for Korean literature on the global stage.