Light and Thread: The Nobel Lecture

Nobel Prize winner Han Kang’s first work of nonfiction published in English—an intimate, inspiring collection of writings on the connections between her life and art.

What is love?

It is the gold thread connecting between our hearts.

In this light-filled and multifaceted book, Han Kang draws together the threads of her work and life, tracing the connections between her interior and exterior worlds through a sequence of essays, poems, photographs, and diary entries, brilliantly translated by Maya West and by e. yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris.

This book of reflections, of words and light, has at its heart the tiny, north-facing courtyard garden of the author’s home, cultivated solely through the reflected sunlight of mirrors Han must move throughout the day, as the earth turns on its axis.

In a poem she wrote at eight years old, Han imagined a gold thread of connection—an idea she explores here with luminous attention, beginning with her Nobel Lecture. She writes of the wonder of following the thread we call language into the depths of other hearts, and her profound sense of an electric current between writer and reader.

Both intimate and illuminating, Light and Thread is a book for all readers of Han Kang’s unique body of work.