Quote by Han Kang: “I don't want to eat. I don't want to do anything that involves an act of will.”

When someone has been subject to overwhelming control or violence, even small acts of choice can feel unbearable or meaningless. This is not laziness — it's a particular form of exhaustion where the will itself has been damaged. It describes a kind of psychological shutdown that's both extreme and deeply recognisable.

Han Kang published The Vegetarian in Korea in 2007, where it won the Yi Sang Literary Prize. The English translation appeared in 2015 and brought her global readership. The novel speaks to the violence of conformity and the cost of female autonomy in a society defined by strict familial and social expectations.

South Korean novelist and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate in 2024. Her novel The Vegetarian, translated into English in 2015, examines bodily autonomy, violence, and resistance through a woman's refusal to eat meat in conformist South Korean society.