Light and Thread by Han Kang review – a tantalising book of reflections

These essays from the Nobel literature winner open up her novels and offer beautiful imagery When Korean novelist Han Kang won the Nobel prize in literature in 2024, the committee praised her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. In other words, Han’s work looks both out at the world – towards the 1980 Gwangju massacre fictionalised in her novel Human Acts  –  and inward to the human experience, as with The Vegetarian’s portrait of one woman’s claustrophobic struggle. Much of the appeal…