Why is the world so violent and painful? And yet, how can the world be this beautiful? Those are among the compelling questions that, Han Kang says, animate her life and work. Her new book, Light and Thread, is a collection of non-fiction pieces in which she dwells on such issues, as well as on the path between ideas and execution.The highlight of the book is her 2024 Nobel Literature Prize lecture. This is a ruminative and deeply personal piece in which she recalls discovering her childhood diaries and being struck by a poem about love being a golden thread connecting hearts. For her, this resonates in her life’s work.She describes the process of writing and completing her novels as encounters with urgent questions. When she finishes exploring, but not necessarily answering them, her writing is done.For example, The Vegetarian wrestled with questions about innocence, violence, and what happens to someone who refuses to belong. Greek Lessons asked: if we must live on in this violent world, which moments make that possible?‘Light and Thread’, Han Kang, e. yaewon (translator), Maya West (translator), Paige Aniyah Morris (translator), Hamish Hamilton, 2026.History and its sorrows also play an important part. When writing Human Acts, based on the 1980 Gwangju massacre, she found herself blocked before rededicating herself to the book, spending months reading hundreds of testimonials for up to nine hours a day, alongside other accounts of state violence and mass killings.The seeds for her next novel were planted by a dream of graves on a vast plain, with an ocean rushing in. She spent years on Jeju Island, walking its forests and coastlines and researching the bloody 1948–49 uprising. This became the basis for We Do Not Part.In its entirety, the lecture reveals how Han Kang views her body of work: as an attempt to bring together contradictory truths about humanity, including its capacity for cruelty as well as for dignity and love. Writing, for her, becomes the act of sitting with this tension, understanding the process, and believing that the thread connecting writer to reader manifests as a form of light. She entrusts her questions to that thread, “sending them out to other selves”.The rest of the pieces in this slim volume, translated by e. yaewon, Paige Aniyah Morris, and Maya West, are slight. They include poetic fragments, lyrics, and photographs that throw light on her sensitivity to her surroundings and love for nature.In one of them, she writes about moving into the first house that she ever owned and settling into it until one day, as she’s stepping out, she hears herself say, “Be right back.” The house has begun to feel like a friend.Several passages deal with the house’s garden: gentle, observant and detailed diary entries on its upkeep, and the flourishing of flowers and plants she cherishes. “Even if something looks dead above the soil,” she learns, “if its roots are strong, it can come back to life”.At one point, she describes laying small mirrors down at suitable angles to catch the sunlight and direct it to her plants. A nice metaphor for the intent of this entire work: gathering thoughts and inspirations that illuminate her fiction.Light and Thread, then, is more of a supplement to Han Kang’s novels than anything else. Read those first, and if you’re moved by them and the questions they raise, turn to this volume to unearth the stimulus and sensibility of the author. Sanjay Sipahimalani is a Mumbai-based writer and reviewer.