More than a million copies of books by Han Kang, the first South Korean to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, have sold locally since the honour was announced, bookstores said.
The short-story writer and novelist is best known overseas for her Man Booker Prize-winning The Vegetarian, her first novel translated into English.
The 53-year-old, who also became the first Asian woman author to win the Nobel, was chosen “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”, the Swedish Academy said last week.
Han’s win has created a sensation in South Korea, with the websites of major bookstores and publishing houses crashing after it was announced, as tens of thousands rushed to order her books.
As of Wednesday morning, at least 1.06 million copies, including e-books, had been sold since the Nobel prize announcement on 10 October, three major bookstores and online retailers,Kyobo, Aladin and YES24, said.
“Han Kang’s books are experiencing unprecedented sales.
“This is a situation we have never seen before,” Kyobo spokesperson Kim Hyun-jung said.
Online bookstore Aladin said Han’s victory had not only led to a staggering 1 200-fold increase in the sales of her books compared with the same period last year, but dramatically boosted the sales of South Korean literature as a whole.
Since her win, “the overall sales of Korean literature increased by more than 12 times compared to the previous year”, it said.
Sales of two books Han recently mentioned she was reading — Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky and Atlas de Botanique Élémentaire by Jean-Jacques Rousseau — had also surged, according to Aladin.
Kyobo Book Centre said, while it did not have exact figures, Han’s books had seen dramatically higher sales compared with other Nobel prize winners.
“We have been in the publishing industry for a while, but this whole situation feels very surreal, even to some of us,” a Kyobo employee said.
South Koreans have been overjoyed by the news, with Han’s alma mater, Seoul’s Yonsei University, displaying banners that read: “Congratulations to the proud Yonsei alumnus, Han Kang, on winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.”
In her hometown of Gwangju —where a massacre occurred in 1980 that inspired Han’s acclaimed novel Human Acts — a congratulatory banner was hung on a building fired on by a military helicopter at the time.
Local reports said some printing houses had been operating at full capacity on the weekend to meet the demand for Han’s books.
“I’ve never been this busy since I joined the company in 2006,” an Aladin employee said.
“But it’s all been very happy.” — AFP
