"I spent the autumn and winter of 2014 in Warsaw. Every day walking the unfamiliar streets of that city, tenaciously reconstructed after 95 percent had been destroyed by bombing during the Second World War, the thought came to me to write about a person who resembled the city. And one day I realised that this person had to be my older sister – a baby who left the world within two hours of being born into it. I wanted to make her live again through lending her my senses, my life. Writing this book was a form of prayer intending to make the things I saw, heard, touched, smelled, and tasted, all with the warmth of my living flesh, into 'her / your' things. And, as is always the case with our prayers, at a certain point it occurred to me that I was not writing for 'her' alone."
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“Suddenly it occurs to you to wonder: when the body dies, what happens to the soul? How long does it linger by the side of its former home?” “When a living person looks at a dead person, mightn’t the person’s soul also be there by its body’s side, looking down at its own face?” Human Acts
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Han Kang
Han Kang (born November 27, 1970) is a South Korean writer. She won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction in 2016 for her novel The Vegetarian. She was awarded Nobel Prize in literature in 2024.
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