Han took home an award at the annual awards ceremony of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) in New York on Thursday, which "presents awards for the finest books published in English in six categories" - fiction, nonfiction, biography, autobiography, poetry, and criticism.
The fiction honor adds to her growing collection of accolades, which includes the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature and the 2016 International Booker Prize for "The Vegetarian."
"We Do Not Part," first published in 2021 and translated into English by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris in 2024, tells the story of a woman confronting the emotional scars left by a bloody anti-communist crackdown on Jeju Island in 1948.
About 10 percent of islanders were killed during the uprising, many of them civilians with little or no connection to insurgents. Shortly after its release in September 2021, Han described the novel as both a historical account of what occurred on April 3, 1948, and an "intense tale of love."
In 2023, the novel already won the Prix Médicis, one of France's most prestigious literary awards, making Han the first novelist to receive the prize, which has recognized foreign works published in translation since 1970.
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