[4] At the age of nine, Han moved to Suyu-ri in Seoul, when her father quit his teaching job to become a full-time writer, four months before the Gwangju Uprising, a pro-democracy movement that ended in the military's massacre of students and civilians.

She first learned about the massacre when she was 12, after discovering at home a secretly circulated memorial album of photographs taken by a German journalist, Jürgen Hinzpeter.

[1][6] Han's father struggled to make ends meet with his writing career, which negatively impacted his family.

[1] In 1998, she participated in the University of Iowa International Writing Program for three months with support from the Arts Council Korea.

[11][12] Her first short story collection, A Love of Yeosu, was published in 1995 and attracted attention for its precise and tightly narrated structure.

[13] In 2007, Han published a book, A Song to Sing Calmly (가만가만 부르는 노래), that was accompanied by a music album.

In her college years Han became obsessed with a line of poetry by the Korean modernist poet Yi Sang: "I believe that humans should be plants.

"[15] She understood Yi's line to imply a defensive stance against the violence of Korea's colonial history under Japanese occupation and took it as an inspiration to write her most successful work, The Vegetarian.

[24][25] Han received the Premio Malaparte for the Italian translation of Human Acts, Atti Umani, by Adelphi Edizioni, in Italy on 1 October 2017.

[34] Han was married to Hong Yong-hee, a literary critic and professor at Kyung Hee Cyber University.

She explained this as a reference to Korean culture, in which a white cloth is used both for babies and for mourning gowns, describing the event as "like a wedding of my manuscript with this forest.

[46] In 2024, Han was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature by the Swedish Academy for her "intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life".