On March 26, 2026, the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) awarded its fiction prize to Han Kang’s novel We Do Not Part. This recognition signifies more than a literary achievement; it marks a moment when the long-suppressed memory of the Jeju 4·3 Incident enters the center of English-language literary conversation.
Han Kang was not present at the ceremony. David Ebershoff, vice president and editor-in-chief at Hogarth, delivered her acceptance speech. His reading was quiet and almost prayer-like. Han wrote that the characters in her novel choose to “stay inside relentless mourning” rather than accept their loss. They “light candles beneath the sea, in the plunge of a pitch-dark night.”
Readers familiar with The Vegetarian or Human Acts know that Han Kang’s works are challenging. Among them, We Do Not Part may be her most understated and enduring. The novel centers on the Jeju 4·3 Incident of 1948, one of the darkest events in modern Korean history, which remained publicly unspoken for decades.
This article goes beyond the award news. It examines why the suppressed memory of the Jeju 4·3 Incident sits at the heart of this novel and why the book is reaching English-language readers now.
What the NBCC Judges Saw in This Novel
The National Book Critics Circle selects annual winners in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, biography, and criticism. For this article, the judges’ response to We Do Not Part is of greater significance than the institution itself.
NBCC fiction committee chair Heather Scott Partington described the novel as “a work of blinding melancholy, bleak weather, and murmuring syntax.” She called it “a subtly rendered sketch of trauma in the wake of the Jeju Massacre — a rumination on creation and truth amidst loss.” The novel, she added, “lingers like an atmospheric, arresting dream.”
This win is significant for Korean readers: We Do Not Part is the first Korean novel to receive the NBCC fiction prize. In the award’s 51-year history, only two other translated works have won in this category: W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (from German, 2001) and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (from Spanish, 2008). Han Kang’s novel is the third.
Another notable development is that, in 2024, poet Kim Hyesoon won the NBCC poetry prize for Phantom Pain Wings, translated by Don Mee Choi. Now, Han Kang has received the fiction prize. This suggests a shift in how Korean literature is received in English. While Han Kang first gained international attention with the sensory impact of The Vegetarian, this novel centers on state violence, mourning, and the ethics of memory.
English-speaking readers often associate Han Kang with the intense imagery and physical resistance depicted in The Vegetarian. However, We Do Not Part is a more measured and enduring novel, focusing on mourning, burial, delayed memory, and the aftermath of state violence rather than sensory disruption. This recognition signals a broadening of the Korean literature available to English-language readers.
The Jeju 4·3 Incident — Korea’s Hidden Wound
To understand the depth of We Do Not Part’s resonance, it is important to know what occurred on Jeju beginning in 1948, and why the event remained so difficult to discuss publicly for decades.
The Jeju 4·3 Incident (제주 4·3 사건) refers to the political upheaval and mass violence on Jeju Island between 1947 and 1954. After Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, the peninsula split along the 38th parallel — the Soviet Union overseeing the north, the United States managing the south.
In 1948, UN-supervised elections were held only in the southern half of the peninsula. Many Jeju residents believed this would permanently divide the country. They organized protests and boycotted the vote. The Syngman Rhee government, backed by the U.S. military administration, responded with brutal force. Martial law followed, then prolonged suppression operations.
According to the Jeju 4·3 Peace Foundation and the 2003 government investigation report, between 25,000 and 30,000 people were killed — roughly 10% of Jeju’s population at the time. The investigation found that 90% of those killed were civilians, at the hands of soldiers and police. Children under 10 and adults over 61 accounted for about 12% of the victims. Women made up more than 21%.
In the following decades, the Jeju 4·3 Incident was publicly dangerous to mention and politically risky to discuss. Under the military regime’s claims to legitimacy, Cold War anti-communist ideology, the National Security Act, and guilt by association, even referencing the Jeju 4·3 Incident could label someone a communist sympathizer. Survivors remained silent, and school textbooks offered minimal coverage of the event.
Truth-telling started late. In 1999, the National Assembly passed the Jeju 4·3 Special Act. In 2003, President Roh Moo-hyun issued the government’s first official apology. April 3 became a national memorial day in 2014. Even so, the event remains politically sensitive today.
Han Kang chose to address this wound, not as a historian presenting facts, but as a novelist exploring what it means to remember what society was instructed to forget. We Do Not Part does not explain the event; instead, it asks how one remembers what could not be spoken.
How Han Kang Wrote This Novel
Han Kang has stated that writing We Do Not Part took seven years, beginning with a single dream.
In her Nobel Prize lecture at the Swedish Academy on December 7, 2024, Han Kang described the starting point herself. In June 2014 — the year she published Human Acts — she had a dream of walking across a vast plain as sparse snow was falling. “Thousands upon thousands of black tree stumps dotted the plain, and behind every last one of them was a burial mound,” she recalled.
She held onto the dream for years, uncertain of its direction. “I didn’t have a clear idea of where it might lead,” she said in the Nobel lecture, “and found myself starting and scrapping the beginnings of several potential stories I imagined might follow from that dream.” In December 2017, she rented a room on Jeju Island and spent two years moving between Jeju and Seoul. “Walking in the forests, along the sea, and on the village roads, feeling the intense Jeju weather at every moment — its wind and light and snow and rain — I sensed the outline of the novel come into focus.”
Both Human Acts and We Do Not Part examine what endures after state violence erases the official record. In a January 2025 interview on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, Han Kang discussed the psychological toll of confronting historical tragedy over extended periods of writing. Referring to the novel’s protagonist Kyungha, a writer who, like Han, wrote about the Gwangju massacre, Han said: “Because she had to deal with the basement of humanity for a long time, she has nightmares.”
When a French publisher asked Han Kang to describe We Do Not Part after it won the Prix Médicis for Foreign Literature in 2023, she offered two framings. She said it was “a story of deep love,” or “a candle lit in the abyss of human nature.”
One of the most striking passages in her Nobel lecture was when she identified the novel’s true center. Not the narrator Kyungha, not her friend Inseon, but Inseon’s mother, Jeongsim. Han Kang called Jeongsim: “She who, having survived the massacres on Jeju, has fought to recover even a fragment of her loved one’s bones so that she can hold a proper funeral. She who refuses to stop mourning. She who bears pain and stands against oblivion. Who does not bid farewell?”
Han Kang then posed the question running through the entire book: “To what extent can we love? Where is our limit? To what degree must we love in order to remain human to the end?”
Considering Han Kang’s public statements, those seven years appear less as a period of refining prose and more as a process of engaging with painful history to find its proper form. We Do Not Part does not explain the event to readers; instead, it immerses them in the experience of ongoing mourning and delayed memory.
Why the Translation Matters
In discussing how this novel reached English-language readers, the translators are as important as the author. The English edition was translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. In her NBCC acceptance speech, Han Kang thanked them, saying they “created an astonishing connection from my mother tongue, Korean, to English for this book.”
The English translation matters here not simply because it made overseas publication possible. We Do Not Part is a novel in which rhythm and atmosphere, restrained prose and regional texture, matter more than plot. With a book like this, translation comes closer to the work of carrying literary sensibility across languages than simply delivering information.
The Jeju dialect, Jejueo, woven throughout the novel, presented a particular challenge for translation. The combination of unfamiliar history, regional dialect, and suppressed memory reaching the forefront of American literary criticism through English translation amplifies the significance of this award.
Why This Novel Is Being Read More Widely Now
Whenever a Korean novel addressing historical trauma receives an international award, a recurring question arises: is the response to the literature itself, or to the suffering it depicts?
In her Nobel lecture, Han Kang named the two sentences that have driven her writing: “Why is the world so violent and painful? And yet how can the world be this beautiful?” We Do Not Part stands on exactly that tension.
The NBCC did not select this novel solely for introducing Western readers to a new tragedy. More important is the novel’s approach to trauma: it is quiet rather than sensational, introspective rather than documentary, and focused on the ethics of mourning rather than political slogans. Han Kang does not explain the Jeju 4·3 Incident with journalistic clarity; instead, she approaches it through dreams, snowstorms, the body of a bird, and the enduring sensation of mourning.
The reason this novel deserves to be read more widely now isn’t only that the Jeju 4·3 Incident belongs to Korean history. Around the world today, civilians continue to die in wars, massacres, and state violence. The historical settings may differ, but the question Han Kang keeps returning to is this: how can human beings preserve dignity in the face of another person’s death? We Do Not Part deals with a specific event in modern Korean history, yet it carries an ethical force that crosses borders.
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Editor’s Comment
What We Do Not Part ultimately holds onto is not the scenes of massacre but the will to remember. What Jeongsim shows is the labor of mourning — a labor that comes before the language of justice. The novel doesn’t stop at recreating the past. It asks how forgetting exposes human beings to violence all over again. In that sense, We Do Not Part is both a historical novel and a novel about the present.