Q&A with author Han Kang

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Han Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea, in 1970. She studied Korean Literature at Yonsei University and has published six novels, including The Vegetarian (2007), Greek Lessons (2011) and Human Acts
(2014), three short story collections, and one book of poetry. She has won many of South Korea’s most prestigious literary prizes, including the Yi Sang prize and the Manhae prize.

Who is your perfect reader?
I’m someone who uses writing as a way to throw out questions. Rather than providing the answers, I believe that the best thing a writer can do is to work on honing the questions. If there is someone able to embrace all of those questions together, she/he would be the perfect reader.

What books are currently on your bedside table?
Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words; Han Byung-chul, Agonie des Eros; Deborah Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know.

What book changed your life?
The short stories of Korean writer Lim Chul-woo, which I read when I was 14. He seemed a writer who crafted sentences to the point of perfectionism, whose works comprised a world particular to him, quite unlike that of anybody else. I wanted to emulate him, though only in the sense of being a writer who created a world that was unique to them; that was the first time I had that thought.

What music helps you write?
When a certain novel or short story holds a particular musical image for me, I listen to that music repeatedly. When I wrote the novel Greek Lessons I listened to Beethoven’s string quartets.

What keeps you awake at night?
Dreams. Sometimes nightmares. I also write about them. Sometimes I feel a voice within me cross some impenetrable veil of consciousness and speak to me.

What is your current favourite word?
Light, which in Korean is also commonly used to mean hue, colour, the look in someone’s eyes.

What book do you wish you’d written?

Borges’s late works. Which he wrote as death approached, undulating closer “slow as a summer night”.

How would you earn your living if you had to give up writing?

I’d rather not imagine such a thing. But if circumstances turned out that way, I’d want to open a small, independent bookshop in the outskirts of Seoul.

‘Human Acts’ is published by Portobello Books

Photograph: Roberto Ricciuti