THE WHITE BOOK, translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith

"A brilliant psychogeography of grief, moving as it does between place, history and memory ... Poised and never flinches from serene dignity... The White Book is a mysterious text, perhaps in part a secular prayer book ... Translated seamlessly by Smith, The White Book succeeds in reflecting Han's urgent desire to transcend pain with language" Deborah Levy, Guardian

"Formally daring, emotionally devastating and deeply political ... A novel told in flashes and fragments, as an act of memory and incantation." Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies

Han Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea and moved to Seoul at the age of ten, where she still lives. Her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today’s Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. The Vegetarian, her first novel to be translated into English, was published in 2015 and won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. She is also the author of Human Acts (2016).

Deborah Smith‘s translations from the Korean include Han Kang's two novels by Han Kang, The Vegetarian and Human Acts, as well as two by Bae Suah, A Greater Music and Recitation. In 2015 Smith completed a PhD at SOAS on contemporary Korean literature and founded Tilted Axis Press. In 2016 she won the Arts Foundation Award for Literary Translation.