STOCKHOLM/SEOUL (Reuters) – South Korean author and Nobel Literature Prize winner Han Kang said on Friday she had been deeply shocked by the news of martial law being declared this week in her homeland, and that force must not be used to suppress the public.
“I watched with shock the situation that was unfolding,” she told a press conference while in Stockholm where she was due to receive the prestigious award worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1 million) next week.
The Swedish Academy lauded Han, the first South Korean to win the literature prize, for “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life” when it announced her as the winner in October.
Han lived as a child in Gwangju, a city known for the killing of people protesting against what was then the ruling dictatorship more than four decades ago that sparked nationwide democracy movements. Her novel “Human Acts” is about victims from this era.
“Like everyone else that night I was deeply shocked,” she said through an interpreter, referring to Tuesday’s night’s events when South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol stunned the nation by declaring martial law for the first time in 44 years.
His action sparked a chaotic stand-off between parliament and the army that saw him rescind the decision only hours later.
“So, to write Human Acts I did spend a lot of time studying the martial law situation we had back in 1979. For me to witness the similar situation unfold in real time before my eyes in 2024 was startling.”
Asked whether she was worried about the future of free speech in South Korea, Han said through the interpreter: “No matter what happens in the future, the truth will continue to be told.”
Many protesters assembled in Seoul against Yoon’s action have said they feared a return to the dictatorships and martial law that marked much of South Korea’s post-war period, before it transitioned to a democratic success story in the 1980s.
(Reporting by Niklas Pollard and Anna Ringstrom in Stockholm and Jack Kim in Seoul; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Frances Kerry)
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