Han Kang (Korean: 한강; born 27 November 1970) is a South Korean writer. From 2007 to 2018, she taught creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. Han rose to international prominence for her novel The Vegetarian, which became the first Korean language novel to win the International Booker Prize for fiction in 2016. Han is the first Asian woman and Korean to be a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, receiving the award in 2024 in recognition of her "intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life".

Han Kang was born on 27 November 1970 in Gwangju, South Korea. According to her father, she is named for the Han River (Korean: 한강; RR: Hangang). Her family is noted for its literary background. Her father is novelist Han Seung-won. Her older brother, Han Dong-rim, is also a novelist, while her younger brother, Han Kang-in, is a novelist and cartoonist.

At the age of nine, Han moved to Suyu-ri in Seoul, when her father quit his teaching job to become a full-time writer, four months before the Gwangju Uprising, a pro-democracy movement that ended in the military's massacre of students and civilians. She first learned about the massacre when she was 12, after discovering at home a secretly circulated memorial album of photographs taken by a German journalist, Jürgen Hinzpeter. This discovery deeply influenced her view on humanity and her literary works.

Han's father struggled to make ends meet with his writing career, which negatively impacted his family. Han later described her childhood as "too much for a little child"; however, being surrounded by books gave her comfort. In 1988, she graduated from Poongmoon Girls' High School, now Poongmoon High School, where she had been a class president. In 1993, Han graduated from Yonsei University, where she majored in Korean language and literature. In 1998, she participated in the University of Iowa International Writing Program for three months with support from the Arts Council Korea.

After graduating from Yonsei University, Han briefly worked as a reporter for the monthly Saemteo magazine. Han's literary career began the same year when five of her poems, including "Winter in Seoul", were featured in the Winter 1993 issue of the quarterly Literature and Society. She made her fiction debut the next year, under the name Han Kang-hyun, when her short story "The Scarlet Anchor" won the New Year's Literary Contest held by the Seoul Shinmun. Her first short story collection, A Love of Yeosu, was published in 1995 and attracted attention for its precise and tightly narrated structure. After the publication, she quit her magazine job to solely focus on writing literature.

In 2007, Han published a book, A Song to Sing Calmly (가만가만 부르는 노래), that was accompanied by a music album. At first she did not intend to sing, but Han Jeong-rim, a musician and music director, insisted that Han Kang record the songs herself. The same year, she started working as a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts until 2018.

In her college years Han became obsessed with a line of poetry by the Korean modernist poet Yi Sang: "I believe that humans should be plants." She understood Yi's line to imply a defensive stance against the violence of Korea's colonial history under Japanese occupation and took it as an inspiration to write her most successful work, The Vegetarian. The second part of the three-part novel, Mongolian Mark, won the Yi Sang Literary Award. The rest of the series (The Vegetarian and Fire Tree) was delayed by contractual problems.

The Vegetarian was Han's first novel translated into English, although she had already attracted worldwide attention by the time Deborah Smith translated it. The translated work won the International Booker Prize 2016 for both Han and Smith. Han was the first Korean writer to be nominated for the award, and The Vegetarian was the first Korean language novel to win the International Booker Prize for fiction. The Vegetarian was also chosen as one of "The 10 Best Books of 2016" by The New York Times Book Review.