April 1, 2026
SEOUL – Nobel Prize-winning author Han Kang won the National Book Critics Circle fiction prize on Thursday for “We Do Not Part,” her novel about the 1948 Jeju massacre, organizers said.
The NBCC announced the award at its annual ceremony in New York. Han, who could not attend, had her acceptance speech read by David Ebershoff, vice president and editor-in-chief of Hogarth and executive editor of Random House.
“Thanking everyone who helped me while I wrote this book over seven years,” the speech read, Han said the novel’s characters “choose to stay within tenacious mourning” rather than accept loss, lighting “candles below the sea.”
“In the pitch-black plunge of the night, I still hope to believe in the blinking light which we have in us, and to move forward, holding it with tenacity,” the speech concluded.
Heather Scott Partington, the fiction committee chair, called the book “a work of blinding melancholy, bleak weather and murmuring syntax” and “a subtly rendered sketch of trauma in the wake of the Jeju massacre — a rumination on creation and truth amidst loss.”
Published in Korean in 2021, the novel reached English-language readers in 2024. It follows three women grappling with the legacy of the April 3, 1948, Jeju Uprising — a civilian protest against US military-led rule that the government of the time falsely branded a communist revolt, killing tens of thousands.
The NBCC prize extends a remarkable run of international recognition for the novel. Its French edition, “Impossibles Adieux,” won the Prix Medicis for foreign literature in 2023 and the Emile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature in 2024. Han received the Nobel Prize in literature in October 2024.