“Books constantly have readers enter another person’s mind and, in that process, deeply explore themselves as well. Repeating this act gives one internal strength — an uncompromising muscle to make clear judgments and think for oneself in a time of unprecedented crisis.”
— Han Kang, Press conference in Stockholm, Sweden, ahead of the Nobel Prize awards ceremony (2024)
Han Kang made history in 2024 as the first Korean writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, recognized for prose that confronts historical trauma and the fragility of human life with unflinching care. These words came from a press conference in Stockholm, just days before she accepted that prize, and they carry the quiet authority of someone who has spent a lifetime inside both the writing and the reading of difficult books.
What she describes here is not a passive act. Entering another person’s mind through reading, she suggests, is also a way of excavating your own. The two movements happen together, and over time they build something durable. She calls it a muscle, which is a precise and honest word. Muscles are earned through repetition. They do not appear fully formed.
The phrase “unprecedented crisis” is not abstract coming from Kang. Her novel Human Acts revisits the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, a moment when an entire society was forced to decide what it believed under extreme pressure. She knows what it looks like when collective judgment fails, and she knows what it costs.
Her argument is ultimately a quiet defense of literature as something more than comfort or entertainment. It is practice for the moments when thinking clearly matters most.
