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Nobel Prize Winner Han Kang's Books Fly Off the Shelves in South Korea

South Korean author Han Kang speaks to the media during a news conference in Seoul, South Korea, on May 24, 2016. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
South Korean author Han Kang speaks to the media during a news conference in Seoul, South Korea, on May 24, 2016. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
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Nobel Prize Winner Han Kang's Books Fly Off the Shelves in South Korea

South Korean author Han Kang speaks to the media during a news conference in Seoul, South Korea, on May 24, 2016. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
South Korean author Han Kang speaks to the media during a news conference in Seoul, South Korea, on May 24, 2016. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

South Koreans flocked to book stores on Friday and crashed websites in a frenzy to snap up copies of the work of novelist Han Kang in her home country, after her unexpected win of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature.
However, the author herself was keeping out of the limelight, Reuters reported.
The country's largest bookstore chain, Kyobo Book Center, said sales of her books had rocketed on Friday, with stocks almost immediately selling out and set to be in short supply for the near future.
"This is the first time a Korean has received a Nobel Prize in Literature, so I was amazed," said Yoon Ki-heon, a 32-year-old visitor at a bookstore in central Seoul.
"South Korea had a poor achievement in winning Nobel Prizes, so I was surprised by news that (a writer of) non-English books, which were written in Korean, won such a big prize."
Soon after Thursday's announcement, some bookstore websites could not be accessed due to heavy traffic. Out of the current 10 best sellers at Kyobo, nine were Han's books on Friday morning, according to its website.
Han's father, well-regarded author Han Seung-won, said the translation of her novel "The Vegetarian,” her major international breakthrough, had led to her winning the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 and now the Nobel prize.
"My daughter's writing is very delicate, beautiful and sad," Han Seung-won said.
"So, how you translate that sad sentence into a foreign language will determine whether you win ... It seems the translator was the right person to translate the unique flavor of Korean language."
Han's other books address painful chapters of South Korean history, including "Human Acts" which examines the 1980 massacre of hundreds of civilians by the South Korean military in the city of Gwangju.
Another novel, "We Do Not Part,” looks at the fallout of the 1948-1954 massacre on Jeju island, when an estimated one in ten of the island's population were killed in an anti-communist purge.
Han Kang received the news of her win about 10 to 15 minutes before the announcement, her father said, and was so surprised that she thought it might be a scam at one point.

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Thousands Greet the Winter Solstice at the Ancient Stonehenge Monument

A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)
A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)
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Thousands Greet the Winter Solstice at the Ancient Stonehenge Monument

A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)
A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)

Thousands of tourists, pagans, druids and people simply yearning for the promise of spring marked the dawn of the shortest day of the year at the ancient Stonehenge monument on Saturday.

Revelers cheered and beat drums as the sun rose at 8:09 a.m. (0809 GMT) over the giant standing stones on the winter solstice — the shortest day and the longest night in the Northern Hemisphere. No one could see the sun through the low winter cloud, but that did not deter a flurry of drumming, chanting and singing as dawn broke.

There will be less than eight hours of daylight in England on Saturday — but after that, the days get longer until the summer solstice in June.

The solstices are the only occasions when visitors can go right up to the stones at Stonehenge, and thousands are willing to rise before dawn to soak up the atmosphere.

The stone circle, whose giant pillars each took 1,000 people to move, was erected starting about 5,000 years ago by a sun-worshiping Neolithic culture, according to The AP. Its full purpose is still debated: Was it a temple, a solar calculator, a cemetery, or some combination of all three?

In a paper published in the journal Archaeology International, researchers from University College London and Aberystwyth University said the site on Salisbury Plain, about 128 kilometers (80 miles) southwest of London, may have had political as well as spiritual significance.

That follows from the recent discovery that one of Stonehenge’s stones — the unique stone lying flat at the center of the monument, dubbed the “altar stone” — originated in Scotland, hundreds of miles north of the site. Some of the other stones were brought from the Preseli Hills in southwest Wales, nearly 240 kilometers (150 miles) to the west,

Lead author Mike Parker Pearson from UCL’s Institute of Archaeology said the geographical diversity suggests Stonehenge may have served as a “monument of unification for the peoples of Britain, celebrating their eternal links with their ancestors and the cosmos.”