More than a million copies of books by Han Kang, the first South Korean to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, have been sold locally since the announcement of her award, bookstores reported on Wednesday.
The acclaimed short story writer and novelist is internationally recognized for her Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Vegetarian, her first work translated into English.
At 53, Han also became the first Asian woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. She was selected “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,” according to the Swedish Academy’s announcement last week.
Han’s win has sparked widespread excitement in South Korea, causing major bookstore and publishing websites to crash as tens of thousands of readers rushed to purchase her books.
As of Wednesday morning, over 1.06 million copies, including e-books, had been sold since the Nobel announcement last Thursday, according to data from three major bookstores and online retailers: Kyobo, Aladin, and YES24.
“Sales of Han Kang’s books are unprecedented. We’ve never seen anything like this before,” Kyobo spokesperson Kim Hyun-jung told AFP.
Online retailer Aladin noted a staggering 1,200-fold increase in the sales of Han’s books compared to the same period last year, and the surge has also boosted sales of South Korean literature as a whole. Since the announcement, overall sales of Korean literature have increased more than twelvefold compared to the previous year, the company reported.
Additionally, sales of two books Han recently mentioned reading—Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky and Atlas de botanique élémentaire by Jean-Jacques Rousseau—have also skyrocketed.
Kyobo Book Centre added that while exact sales figures are still being tallied, Han’s books have sold at a far higher rate than those of past Nobel laureates. “We’ve been in the publishing industry for a long time, but this feels surreal even to us,” a Kyobo employee remarked.
South Koreans have expressed immense pride in Han’s achievement. Banners congratulating Han have been displayed at her alma mater, Yonsei University, while her hometown of Gwangju — the setting of her acclaimed novel Human Acts, inspired by the 1980 massacre — also hung a congratulatory banner on a historic building involved in the event.
Reports suggest that some printing houses have been working at full capacity to meet the high demand for Han’s books. “I’ve never been this busy since I started in 2006,” said an Aladin employee. “But it’s been a very happy experience.”