Light and Thread by Han Kang 빛과 실

At last, spring has arrived—green light awakens with the wonder of life. As long as we are alive, to imagine hope is to engage in an enduring, profound act of love—Han Kang’s record of this love.

Han Kang, who was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature with the citation “for her poetic prose that confronts historical trauma and reveals the fragility of human life,” returns with her latest work, Light and Thread. This collection includes her Nobel Lecture “Light and Thread” (2024), unpublished poems and essays, and diary entries written after she gained her first true home—with a north-facing room and a garden she could call her own. Life Pattern Korea.
For over thirty years, Han Kang has lived with the identity of a “person who writes,” propelled by the tension between two fundamental questions: “Why is the world so violent and painful?” and “How can the world also be so beautiful?” As she reflects in these pages, perhaps the deepest layer of all her questions has always pointed toward love: “the most ancient and essential resonance of my life” (p.29). In prose and poetry, diary entries and photographs, written at different times but now placed in harmony, Han Kang searches for this resonance. Life Pattern Korea. As a self-described “north-facing person” (from “The North-Facing Room”), she writes and reads in a room where the sun does not reach, tending to shade-loving plants in her garden, adjusting small table mirrors throughout the day to catch stray sunlight. Her tender, quiet rituals become luminous as we read. One line echoes clearly throughout: “Literature, which handles the language that tenaciously imagines the first-person voices of beings and lives on this planet, inevitably contains warmth” (p.34). Life Pattern Korea.
Han writes, “It was writing that pushed me and moved me toward life” (p.57). As black and white pages alternate, the interplay between text and image reveals the light and shadow in her room and garden, drawing the reader into her days and nights. From her earliest memories, stored in saddle-stitched notebooks from childhood, to her longing for warmth and life, to the vivid sensations of 2020–2024 amid the COVID-19 pandemic—what she saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt in her north-facing room and garden now live on in this book. Life Pattern Korea. “There’s a clear greenish light that appears when sunlight passes through leaves. Every time I see it, I feel something specific—a joy that seems almost primal, as if encoded in human genes through our long cohabitation with plants.” (from “The North-Facing Garden”, p.95) Life Pattern Korea.
Through Han Kang’s “poetic prose,” meeting the form of “borderless writing,” the world that unfolds in Light and Thread is filled with the wonder of life and the brilliance of light. Life Pattern Korea.

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