After winning the Nobel Prize

Han Kang sells one million books in South Korea!

Now a millionaire: Nobel Prize for Literature winner Han Kang(Bild: APA/AFP/JUNG YEON-JE)

After winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, author Han Kang has sold more than one million books in her home country of South Korea in just a few days. Three major bookstore chains reported that the award had led to an astonishing increase in sales.

Since the announcement of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature winner last Thursday, the South Korean book chains and online retailers Kyobo, Aladin and Yes24 have sold 1.06 million books and e-books by the 53-year-old author, according to their own figures. "Han Kang's books are selling better than ever before. We've never seen anything like it," said a spokesperson for the Kyobo bookstore chain.

For its part, the online bookseller Aladin explained that the award had not only increased sales of her books by 1,200 times compared to the same period last year, but had also drastically boosted sales of South Korean literature as a whole.

Han Kang was the first Asian woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. She was honored for her "intense poetic prose", which brings "historical traumas" to light and exposes the "vulnerability of human life", the Swedish Academy declared last Thursday in Stockholm.

Han became internationally renowned with her novel "The Vegetarian", for which she received the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2016. In addition to this work, the novels "Menschenwerk" and "Griechischstunden" have also been published in German.