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NBCC recognition creates spike in sales for Han Kang's 'We Do Not Part' in Korea

Published: 31 Mar. 2026, 14:00 Updated: 31 Mar. 2026, 18:19

KIM MIN-YOUNG
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Author Han Kang delivers her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, Sweden, on Dec. 10, 2024. [NEWS1]

Han Kang’s novel “We Do Not Part” (2021) gained renewed momentum in bookstores after its English translation won the fiction prize at the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Awards last week.

Online sales of “We Do Not Part” at Kyobo Book Centre rose 11.5 times over the three days from Friday to Sunday after news of the award broke, compared to the previous three-day period from March 24 to 26, according to publisher Munhakdongne and booksellers. Over the same period, sales at Aladin jumped 17.8 times.

Han Kang won the award last Thursday.

Founded in 1974, the NBCC Awards are among the best-known literary honors in the United States. The awards recognize the finest books published in English in six categories: fiction, nonfiction, biography, autobiography, poetry and criticism.

“We Do Not Part” is a full-length novel that unravels the tragedy of the Jeju April 3 Uprising through the perspectives of three women. The work is widely seen as an exploration of loss, memory and mourning in poetic language.

The armed uprising happened on April 3, 1948, amid the island's opposition to police repression. Official truth-finding and Unesco materials say the period left tens of thousands of islanders dead, many of them civilians, and remained a long-suppressed national trauma before later investigations and state apologies.

“It is a subtly rendered sketch of trauma in the wake of the Jeju Massacre and a rumination on creation and truth amidst loss,” committee chair Heather Scott Partington said of the book. “This artful novel lingers like an atmospheric and arresting dream.”

Han won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024. Her major novel “Human Acts” (2014) also soared in sales numbers in the domestic book market after that win.

BY KIM MIN-YOUNG [[email protected]]