Han Kang "Der goldene Faden" x Harbour Front Literaturfestival Hamburg

In cooperation with NDR Kultur
Featuring: Jan Ehlert, NDR (moderator)

Reading and moderated discussion
in Korean and German (with translation)

To kick off the Harbour Front Literature Festival, one of the world’s most exciting authors of the moment is coming to Hamburg for the first time: South Korean Nobel Prize winner Han Kang.

She received the prize for her entire body of work, but certainly also for her international bestseller *The Vegetarian*. The novel tells the story of a completely ordinary woman who first becomes a vegetarian and eventually stops eating altogether. Until she tries to sustain herself solely on sunlight—like a plant that photosynthesizes. And she wants to become a plant herself…

What’s behind this? “Weird Girl Fiction” is the name given to the global literary trend in which women refuse to submit to the relentless role expectations directed at them and instead invent their own world with its own rules.

In her new book, Han Kang tackles further fundamental questions of our existence with the clarity of someone who has not yet forgotten how to view life in a very basic way: Why is the world rife with violence? How can it be that it is so beautiful at the same time? The Nobel Prize winner explores these questions in numerous texts in search of something beyond violence: something gentle and bright that connects us all.

In a poem she wrote as a young girl—and which she would rediscover many years later in a shoebox—she imagines a “golden thread.” This thread, she writes, is nothing other than literature itself: a language capable of linking our separate inner worlds together. Something that perhaps only love can otherwise do—as a “golden thread” that can connect people’s hearts.

But Han Kang means even more by love: In her diary entries, she describes her small, north-facing garden in Seoul, where she has set up mirrors: As the Earth rotates on its axis, she readjusts the mirrors hour by hour to bathe the garden, the flowers, and the plants in light and life.

“The Golden Thread” is an intimate book, an opportunity to encounter the inner and outer worlds of this great artist. A key to her work.

Han Kang(b. 1970) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024. She rose to fame with the international bestseller *The Vegetarian* (published in German in 2016). Other important works include *White* (published in German in 2020) and *Impossible Farewell* (published in German in 2024).