Han Kang

The Vegetarian starts with a woman who decides to stop eating meat and is narrated by three people around her, none of them her, as her family escalates from irritation to force.

Han took the International Booker for it in 2016 and the Nobel in 2024. Human Acts turns to the Gwangju uprising of 1980 and the bodies afterwards, and We Do Not Part to Jeju. Her father is a novelist too. The writing is spare and physical, preoccupied with what a body will and will not do, and she has said she keeps returning to the question of whether human beings can be reconciled with human violence.