"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, South Korean Nobel laureate Han Kang comes to Hamburg for the very first time - her Germany premiere. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature 2024 for her body of work, and rose to international fame above all through the global bestseller "The Vegetarian": the novel follows a perfectly ordinary woman who first stops eating meat, then stops eating altogether - until she tries to sustain herself on sunlight alone like a plant, and ultimately wants to become one.

In her new book "Der goldene Faden", Han Kang asks fundamental questions: why is the world saturated with violence - and yet so beautiful? Across many texts she circles this tension, searching for something beyond violence: something gentle and luminous that connects people to one another. The title comes from a poem she wrote as a young girl and rediscovered years later in a shoebox - in it she imagines literature as a "golden thread" linking our separate inner worlds.

The book also includes diary entries about her small, north-facing garden in Seoul, where she has placed mirrors: hour after hour she repositions them so that light falls on the flowers and plants.

Han Kang (*1970) is also known for "The White Book" (in German: 2020) and "We Do Not Part" (in German: 2024).