Greek Lessons by Han Kang

Greek Lessons by Han Kang
£9.99

Info:

Translated by Deborah Smith and E. Yaewon.
Paperback, Feb 2024.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780241997062

In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice.

Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son.

For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages. Greek Lessons is a tender love letter to human connection, a novel to awaken the senses, vividly conjuring the essence of what it means to be alive.

Shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2024

 

About Han Kang

Han Kang was born in 1970 in South Korea. In 1993 she made her literary debut as a poet and published her first short story in 1994. She won the Man Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian and was shortlisted for The White Book. In 2024, Han Kang was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life’.
Among other major awards and prizes she is the winner of the Prix Medicis Etranger 2023 for the French edition of We Do Not Part. She taught in the department of creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts for eleven years before leaving in 2018 to focus on writing. She is the fifth writer to contribute to the ongoing Future Library project in Oslo, Norway.