Han Kang wins US National Book Critics Circle Award for 'We Do Not Part'

Author Han Kang delivers a speech during the Nobel Prize banquet at City Hall in Stockholm, Dec. 10, 2024. AFP-Yonhap

Nobel Prize-winning author Han Kang’s novel “We Do Not Part” won the U.S. National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Award on Thursday (local time), one of the most prestigious literary honors in the United States.

The NBCC announced that Han received the award in the fiction category. The novel, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, was published in the United States last year.

Speaking about the winning work, the NBCC said the novel is “a work of blinding melancholy, bleak weather and murmuring syntax. It is a subtly rendered sketch of trauma in the wake of the Jeju Massacre and a rumination on creation and truth amidst loss. This artful novel lingers like an atmospheric and arresting dream.”

The award marks another honor for the Korean author following her Nobel Prize win in 2024.

Set against the backdrop of one of the darkest chapters in modern Korean history, “We Do Not Part” centers on the 1948 Jeju April 3 Uprising, a protest against U.S. military-led rule that the then-government falsely labeled a communist revolt, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians.

The novel traces the tragedy through the perspectives of three women, rendering the indelible grief of state violence and the pain of those who lost their families and struggled to find missing loved ones in Han's characteristically poetic language.

Since its publication in Korean in 2021, the novel has been translated into Chinese, French, Dutch, Japanese, and other languages. The French edition, published as “Impossibles adieux,” won the Prix Medicis for foreign literature in 2023 and the Emile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature in 2024. The Japanese translation earned the Research and Translation prize at the Yomiuri Literary Awards in 2025.

David Ebershoff, vice president and editor-in-chief of Hogarth Books, Han Kang's publisher for the novel in the U.S., delivers an acceptance speech on Han's behalf at the National Book Critics Circle's (NBCC) annual awards ceremony in New York, Thursday (local time). Captured from NBCC's YouTube account

The NBCC Award is a leading American literary prize given by a nonprofit association of book critics founded in New York in 1974. Each year since 1975, the group has honored the best English-language books published in the U.S. in categories of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, biography and translation.

Han became the second Korean author to win the award. In 2024, Poet Kim Hye-soon made history with her collection “Phantom Pain Wings,” translated by Choi Don-mee.

Unable to attend the ceremony, the author conveyed her gratitude and the novel’s core message in a written speech.

"In this book, there are the ones who have resolved not to bid farewell. Instead of the impossible farewell, they choose to stay within tenacious morning, they light candles below the sea, in the pitch black plunge of the night," David Ebershoff, vice president and editor-in-chief of Hogarth Books, Han's publisher for the novel, read on her behalf.

"I still hope to believe in the blinking light, which we have in us, and move forward, holding it with tenacity, hopefully.”

She also thanked the two translators of the novel for “the incredible connection you have made for this book from my mother tongue Korean to English.”