A reader holds a copy of Han Kang's novel “We Do Not Part” at the Kyobo Book Centre in Seoul, March 27. The English edition of the book won the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Yonhap
Kyobo Book Centre said Sunday that Han's “The Vegetarian” and “Human Acts” ranked first and second, respectively, in its cumulative bestseller list covering April 17, 2016 to April 16, 2026, across online and offline channels. The period was chosen to mark the 10 years since “The Vegetarian” won the International Booker Prize in May 2016, the first time a Korean-language novel received the award.
“The Vegetarian,” first published in Korean in 2007 and translated into English under the same title, gained renewed attention after the prize and went on to spend 12 consecutive weeks at the top of Kyobo’s weekly overall bestseller chart, becoming the chain’s bestselling book of 2016.
Han’s 2014 novel “Human Acts,” about the 1980 Gwangju Democratization Movement, saw a surge in sales after the author became the first Korean writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024. The book topped Kyobo’s annual bestseller rankings in both 2024 and 2025 and now holds second place in the decade-long cumulative count.
Another one of Han’s works, the 2021 novel “We Do Not Part,” which centers around the Jeju April 3 Uprising, placed eighth. The book’s position follows its success in major international awards, including the Prix Medicis etranger in France in 2023 and a National Book Critics Circle award in the United States earlier this year.
In total, six of the top 10 titles on Kyobo’s decade list are Korean novels. Kim Ho-yeon’s “The Second Chance Convenience Store,” Lee Mi-ye’s “Dallergut Dream Department Store” and Yang Gui-ja’s “Contradictions” occupy the fifth to seventh spot.
The remaining four are essay and self-help titles that reflect steady demand for inspirational reading: the anonymous authored “Seino’s Teachings” is third, Lee Ki-joo’s essay collection “The Temperature of Language” is fourth, Kim Soo-hyun’s “I Decided to Live as Me” is ninth and “Winnie-the-Pooh, Happy Things Happen Every Day” rounds out the list at 10th place.
The bestseller data comes amid Korea’s shrinking reading population.
The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism’s 2025 survey found that 38.5 percent of adults read or listened to at least one book — excluding textbooks, test prep materials, magazines and comics — between September 2024 and August 2025, down from 67.4 percent in 2015.
Korean adults read an average of 2.4 books during the year, compared with 7.5 in 2019, while paper book reading fell from 9.1 books a year to 1.3 over roughly a decade.
Source: Korea Times News
