“What a great day for Korea!” my mom wrote to me on Thursday. “Nobel for Han Kang!”

For the past few decades, several South Korean authors have been bruited about as contenders for the Nobel Prize in Literature, notably the poet Ko Un and the novelist Hwang Sok-yong, elder statesmen who were both previously jailed forpolitical activism. As an American-born writer of Korean ancestry, I liked these authors in theory, but their actual work didn’t jump off the page for me, an English-only reader. If I wasn’t “getting” it, what chance did it