Light and Thread is a tiny book you can read in one sitting. It pulls together Han Kang’s Nobel Lecture with a few essays, poems, and photos she took herself also, she shares the questions she keeps coming back to.

Do not underestimate the slimness of this book because it has big questions inside. Maybe also the ones that not foreign to you, like how can people be so violent? How can others stand up against that violence? What does it really mean to be human? If you’ve read Han Kang’s works, for example Human Acts or We Do Not Part, you’ll know this feeling well.

Here, she also writes about how she writes by experiencing the whole body: seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling heat and cold and pain, even her own heartbeat. She pours all of that living feeling into her words. She calls it a thread of language that ties two people together.

For Han Kang, the purpose writing is to understand the basics: why we’re born, why we hurt, why we love. And she believes books carry a warmth that pushes back against anything that destroys life.

For such a short read, it’s full of feeling. The ending won me over completely with a garden diary about the small, north-facing garden behind her home, where she shifts mirrors around all day to bounce sunlight onto her plants. After all those heavy questions about life, we end with a woman chasing the sun by hand.

If you already love Han Kang’s novels, this is a warm little companion. And if you’re new to her works, it’s a gentle way in.

My Favorite Bits

• I took a photo of that poem with my phone. I did this out of a sense that there was a continuity between some of the words I had written then and who I now was. Inside my chest, in my beating heart. Between our hearts. The golden thread that joins—a thread that emanates light.

• I had long lost a sense of deep-rooted trust in humans. How, then, could I embrace the world? I had to face this impossible conundrum if I meant to move for-wards, I realized. I understood that writing was my only means of getting through and past it.

• I sensed at certain moments that the past was indeed helping the present, and that the dead were saving the living.

• Looking back over the time I have spent reading and writing, I have relived this moment of wonder, again and again. Following the thread of language into the depths of another heart, an encounter with another interior.

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Author: Han Kang
Publication date: 18 March 2025
Number of pages: 176 pages

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