Complaint filed against writer who called Han Kang's historic Nobel win 'shameful and sad'

Han Kang (Yonhap)

A South Korean civic group on Monday said it has filed a complaint against a local writer alleging she has defamed Han Kang, the first Korean and first Asian woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature.

The group, Citizens' Solidarity for the Eradication of Deeply-rooted Corruption, accused Kim Gyu-na of a "politically-motivated and personal attack against an individual that not only exceeds the limits of freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution, but also goes beyond boundaries human beings should never cross."

Novelist Kim, 56, denounced Han's historic win on Oct. 11 claiming that most of Han's works distort history by depicting state violence as having led to civilian deaths during the Gwangju Democratic Uprising of May 1980 and government suppression of the 1948-54 civilian uprising in Jeju Island. Kim claimed Han's win is thus "shameful and sad," in a Facebook post.

Kim said that Han's win "shows a decline in the value of the Nobel Prize, proof of hypocrisy in the literary circle and the justification of the distortion of history."

She also criticized the Nobel Prize committee for selecting a woman this year.

On Oct. 14, Kim claimed in another Facebook post that her only nephew had severed ties with her over her recent comments, saying that he "is a scholarship student at Yonsei University, but his leftist ideology is thoroughly ingrained in him."

"(Kim) spread false information through social media with the intention of malicious slander, causing irreparable damage not only to Han's reputation, but also to the victims and bereaved families of the Gwangju and Jeju Uprising massacres, as well as to the general public," the civic group said.

It accused Kim of violating the Special Act on the May 18 Democratization Movement, which was revised in December 2020 to penalize those involved in making false claims about the Gwangju Uprising, along with online defamation as stipulated in the Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection.

State investigations have confirmed that bloody crackdowns led to the massacres of civilians in both the Gwangju and Jeju Uprisings, with the Ministry of the Interior and Safety finalizing its compensation plan for the victims in 2021. During the administration of then-President Kim Young-sam in 1995, the government enacted the Special Act on the May 18 Democratization Movement, which mandated the investigation of the Gwangju tragedy and punishment for those held responsible, including former Presidents Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo.