Han Kang Takes the Stage with the Berlin Philharmonic: “Music Can Also Give Me the Strength to Write Novels”

[Financial News] Nobel Prize in Literature-winning author Han Kang attended the reading performance “Satzwechsel” at the Berlin Philharmonie Chamber Hall in Germany on the evening of the 7th local time, where she shared stories about music and writing.
Asked whether she writes while listening to music or finds it distracting, Han Kang replied, "Revising requires energy, so sometimes I turn the music up so loud that my ears feel like they might fall off." She added, "When I hear certain music, I sometimes think, ‘I want to try writing a novel with this kind of feeling,’ so during the early stages, I may listen to the same music repeatedly." She continued, "It is difficult to say that I like a particular genre. I tend to repeat music that I simply enjoy," adding, "Recently, I have attended several classical concerts and sometimes listened to somewhat experimental music as well."
The story behind Kim Kwang-seok’s “My Song,” which appears on the so-called “Han Kang playlist,” is also included in her essay collection Light and Thread, published last year. Recalling the period during the COVID-19 pandemic when she was writing We Do Not Part, Han Kang recited a line from the song’s lyrics: "Even if I tremble and fall, as long as there is one last drop of water in this world, I will drink and sing." When the host asked whether she also liked dancing, she replied, "The song gave me so much strength that I even danced while spinning in circles, imagining that I was figure skater Yuna Kim."
Han Kang took the stage with members of the Berlin Philharmonic that day. After Claude Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane was performed, she spoke about her usual writing process, behind-the-scenes stories from the Nobel Prize in Literature, and how she found a traditional Korean house and tended its garden—experiences she also wrote about in Light and Thread.
Han Kang amused the audience by saying, "People have all bought me chamomile tea, so I have enough piled up at home to drink for more than 10 years." After being announced as the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, she said in an interview that she had "celebrated by drinking chamomile tea with my son."
Regarding the perception that she writes about political subjects, she said, "I wonder whether we can really separate the political from the personal." She added, "The Vegetarian may seem like a very personal novel, but I think it is actually an extremely political novel." She continued, "Rather than setting out from the beginning to deal with history, I came to write Human Acts through the process of entering into the inner world," adding, "I did not think, ‘I will become a writer who deals with history.’ It seems that there was simply no other path for me."
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