Nobel laureate Han Kang craze revives Korean book market
Mi-Nah Lee
Oct 14, 2024 (Gmt+09:00)
Employees at a book printing house in Paju, Gyeonggi Province, working on the binding of Han Kang's books South Koreans are flocking to bookstores to snap up 2024 Nobel laureate Hang Kang’s novels, making her books — and even those of her novelist father — bestsellers just three days after she won the Nobel Prize in literature last week.
Han Gang's print book sales skyrocketed by 2,240 times to 310,000 copies until Oct. 13 after she was awarded the distinguished prize on Oct. 10, according to online bookstore Yes24. The figure compares to her book sales over the same period last year.
Thanks to the unexpected boom, some printing houses are running factories all day. Cumulative sales of the novelist's books have surpassed 680,000 copies since Oct. 10 at major bookstores around the country.
Han Kang speaks at a press conference in November 2023 (Courtesy of Yonhap) Koreans in their 40s were the most avid readers of Han’s printed books, accounting for 34.6% of her paper book sales.
But they didn’t bother to line up outside bookshops early in the morning to snatch her books once the stores opened, in the so-called open run race.
On Oct. 11, the day after she won the Nobel Prize, Han’s two highly recognized books — The Vegetarian and Human Acts — sold 38,000 copies each via Yes24. That marked the largest-ever single-day sale for a book at the online bookstore.
The 53-year-old novelist became the first Korean Nobel laureate in literature. She was also the first Korean winner of the Booker Prize, awarded for her cult novel The Vegetarian in 2016.
Her books have swept the bestsellers lists, in both print and e-book versions, since Oct. 10.
Han’s e-book sales soared by 667 times during Oct. 10-13 compared with the year-earlier period, led by readers in their 30s, who accounted for 32.6% of her e-book sales.
Sales of her translated books shot up by 1,600 times, led by readers in their 50s.
Han Kang's books being restocked at Kyobo Bookstore on Oct. 14, 2024 (Courtesy of Yonhap) Some readers said they were unfamiliar with her writing style, especially the way she describes violent scenes, and found them hard to digest due to their heavy subject matter. Aside from The Vegetarian, her novels Human Acts and We Do Not Part were rooted in modern Korean history under autocratic regimes.
Readers are now giving these books another shot.
Her father, the well-known novelist Han Seung-won, also enjoyed a surge in his book sales over the past four days.