Description "That dawn, a heavy snowfall covered every trace." 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Han Kang The story of those who had to breathe desperately, standing on the razor's edge between life and death The fourth full-length novel by Han Kang, a writer who poses profound questions about life Han Kang began her literary career in 1993, publishing the poem "Winter in Seoul" and four others in the winter issue of the quarterly Munhak-gwa-Sahoe (Literature and Society), and the following year winning the Seoul Shinmun New Year's Literary Award for her short story "The Red Anchor." This is her fourth full-length novel. With quiet yet powerful prose and a lyrical style, Han Kang has persistently探ored the essential desires of human beings and the truths of life hidden beneath the surface of ordinary existence. She has received the Korean Novel Literature Award (1999), Today's Young Artist Award (2000), Yi Sang Literary Award (2005), Dongni Literary Award (2010), Manhae Literary Award (2014), Hwang Sun-won Literary Award (2015), the Man Booker International Prize (2016), the Malaparte Literary Prize (2017), the Kim Yu-jeong Literary Award (2018), the San Clemente Literary Prize (2019), the Daesan Literary Award (2022), the Prix Médicis étranger (2023), the Prix Émile Guimet de littérature asiatique (2024), and the Nobel Prize in Literature (2024), earning consistent recognition both in Korea and abroad. The Wind Blows, Go is a work into which the author poured roughly four and a half years of effort. She began conceiving the story around the fall of 2005, serialized the middle portion in the quarterly Munhak-gwa-Sahoe over a year and a half from the fall of 2007 to the following fall, and then spent another year or so rewriting the entire novel from the beginning to complete it. Over some 400 pages, the novel unfolds the story of people who, following the mysterious death of a promising young female painter, throw themselves body and soul—as if waging a fierce battle—into proving the truth each of them believes, and who are wounded in the process. Two car accidents, forty years apart, both occurring at dawn on Misiryeong Pass, and the intimate stories of the people entangled in them, unfold through the memories and arduous journey of the narrator, Lee Jung-hee, as she searches relentlessly for the truth. Through The Wind Blows, Go—a novel that pulses with the rhythm of ragged breath and narrative waves as the emotional currents between characters, their relationships, the novel's structure and style, and the complicated flow of time continually collide and clash—the author asks: How should we live this life, standing as we do on the sharp edge of an existence that trembles and agonizes at every moment? Can we truly attain a genuine light simply by living through it? Around the time of the novel's publication, Han Kang said in an interview that she wanted to write "a novel that breaks the conventions of the novel while still possessing the body of a novel" ("This Author: Han Kang—Author Interview," Munhak-gwa-Sahoe, Spring 2010, p. 341). Beyond the boundary between life and death, the novel brings together and illuminates themes that had previously appeared only fragmentarily throughout Han Kang's work: the origin of life, understanding and love for others, the appropriation and reconstruction of memory, the nature of madness and dark desire within us, an intense will to live, and a deeply attentive gaze toward nature and art. Around the fall of 2005, the author happened to hear about "breath fighting"—a term describing the conflict that occurs when an unconscious patient on a ventilator suddenly begins breathing on their own. From this term, the author vividly imagined a woman fighting for breath while hooked up to a respirator, and was seized by an intense urge to write her story. Thus, over four bitterly cold winters, the author wrote the novel that became The Wind Blows, Go. Like a subway map tangled in confusion, without a clear beginning or end, the novel follows the characters' memories and consciousness as they drift between present and past. Wandering through the depths of astrophysics—which conveys the unfathomable mystery of the universe and the origin of life—and through the overwhelming ink paintings that dominate the inner worlds of the characters (Lee Jung-hee, Lee Dong-ju, Seo In-ju), readers finally arrive at the point where the author's breathless rhythm reaches them. If life is made up of moments of terrible anguish and suffering as we stand on the sharp boundary between life and death, and moments of taut tension where breath collides with breath, then how must we live out this life given to us? Lee Jung-hee and Seo In-ju are friends from the same neighborhood in Suyu-ri, who attended middle school and high school together.