Overview
- Han Kang’s novel won the National Book Critics Circle fiction award at The New School in New York on Thursday, with editor David Ebershoff reading her message and accepting the prize.
- NBCC fiction chair Heather Scott Partington called the book “a work of blinding melancholy” and “a subtly rendered sketch of trauma.”
- The story centers on three women facing grief tied to the 1948 Jeju April 3 Uprising, a crackdown that left tens of thousands of civilians dead.
- The English edition, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris in 2024, brought the book to English-language readers and made it eligible for U.S. prizes.
- The award extends a run of honors that includes France’s Prix Médicis in 2023 and the Emile Guimet Prize in 2024, following Han’s Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024.