Join us for a rare American visit by Han Kang, one of the most prominent novelists in contemporary world literature. Han’s first book, The Vegetarian (Hogarth 2016)–a phantasmagoric fable about a wife whose carnivorous renunciation disrupts her marriage in ways whose consequences are ultimately grotesque–won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. Shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, her newest book, The White Book (Hogarth 2019), a woman at a writer’s residency in snow-covered Warsaw meditates on the color white as a way of processing traumas that have haunted her family. Moderated by former AAWW Fellow E. Tammy Kim, a contributor to The New Yorker and New York Times Magazine.

Co-sponsored by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI). Please note the 6:30pm start time!

RESERVE A SEAT!
$5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Essentially a letter from Han to her sister, Han Kang’s The White Book offers a lyrical and disquieting exploration of grief that functions as “a secular prayer book” (The Guardian) and contains “some of Han’s best writing to date” (NPR). As Katie Kitamura wrote in the New York Times Book Review: “Formally daring, emotionally devastating and deeply political…In this subtle and searching novel, Kang, through Smith, proposes a model of genuine empathy, one that insists on the power of shared experience but it not predicated on the erasure of difference.” A participant in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Han has won the Man Booker International Prize, the Yi Sang Literary Award, the Today’s Young Artist Award, and the Manhae Prize for Literature. A professor at the Seoul Institute of the Arts, Han Kang is translated by Deborah Smith.

Moderated by former AAWW Fellow E. Tammy Kim, who has written about the Koreas for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. E. Tammy Kim is a freelance reporter and contributing opinion writer for The New York Times whose work has also appeared in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. She reviewed Han Kang’s Human Acts for The Nation in 2017, and previously worked as a social-justice lawyer. Read her writings as an AAWW Open City Fellow here.

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This event will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page.

NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY
*The space is wheelchair accessible. No stairs. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor.
*We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free.
If you all have any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org with any questions on reserving priority seating.

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