"Der goldene Faden" (Germany Premiere)

in cooperation with NDR Kultur

with: Jan Ehlert (host)
Reading and moderated conversation
in Korean and German (with translation)

To open the Harbour Front Literaturfestival, one of the most compelling writers in the world today comes to Hamburg for the first time: South Korean Nobel laureate Han Kang.

She received the prize for her body of work as a whole, but surely also for her global bestseller "The Vegetarian". The novel follows the story of a perfectly ordinary woman who first stops eating meat, then stops eating altogether - until she tries to survive on sunlight alone, like a plant performing photosynthesis. And she wants to become a plant herself...

What lies behind this? "Weird Girl Fiction" is the name given to a worldwide literary trend in which women refuse to submit to the relentless role expectations placed on them and instead invent their own world with their own rules.

In her new book, Han Kang brings the clarity of someone who has not yet forgotten how to look at life in the most fundamental way, turning to further essential questions of our existence: Why is the world shot through with violence? How can it be so beautiful at the same time? The Nobel laureate circles these questions across many texts, searching for something beyond violence - something gentle and luminous that connects us to one another.

In a poem she wrote as a young girl, rediscovered years later in a shoebox, she imagines a "golden thread". This thread, she writes, is nothing other than literature itself: a language capable of linking our separate inner worlds. Something that perhaps only love can otherwise do - a "golden thread" that ties human hearts together.

But Han Kang means even more by love: in diary entries she tells of her small, northward-pointing...