Han Kang is the best-known name in the South Korean delegation at this year's Book Fair. She is up to date with The White Book, an elegy about the void of a sister who never grew up. In 2016, she was awarded the International Man Booker Prize for the novel Vegetarian, which explores violence and power structures in South Korean society. It is about a woman who stops eating meat and thus starts to be pushed away from her family.

The book was published in South Korea more than ten years ago, and according to Han Kang himself, it was ahead of its time in its home country.

- At that time, many had a hard time understanding the main character, people thought she was a strange woman. But nowadays, many can identify with her pain and see themselves in her. We are living in a different time now where many radical ideas are emerging, she says.

"Born into a culture of inequality"

Author Kim Soom writes - just like Han Kang - about what it's like to be a woman in South Korea. She says that the metoo movement has played a major role in the development of the country in recent years.

- The earliest form of discrimination and inequality is the one in the home. Korean society is born into a culture of inequality and sexual violence, it is even passed on from mother to daughter. In some cases you are not aware of it yourself, in others you are not heard. But thanks to metoo, much of this has come to the surface, says Kim Soom.

Hope for official apology

Among other things, she has written several books on so-called "comfort women", a euphemism for the girls and women who were forced to work at brothels where Japanese soldiers went to buy sex between 1932 and 1945.

"My hope is that the Korean comfort women who are still alive will get an official apology from the Japanese government before it's too late," she says.

Kim Soom has no answer as to whether any topics are still taboo to write about as a Korean writer. According to her colleague Han Kang, at least there is no longer any censorship.

- The black list, in particular, has had a major impact on the younger generation of writers, and I am so happy that there is no more. Now there is a wide diversity in the South Korean literary scene, with many voices from feminists and sexual minorities. Writers in South Korea are looking for a new direction, says Han Kang.