Thinkers Timeline

Ha-Joon Chang is a South Korean economist. He was born in 1963 in Seoul, South Korea. He grew up during a remarkable period in his country's history. When Chang was a child, South Korea was poor. Within his lifetime it became a wealthy, industrial nation. Watching this happen shaped the central question of his career: how do poor countries actually become rich? Chang studied economics at Seoul National University, then moved to Britain to study at the University of Cambridge, where he earned his doctorate. He taught economics at Cambridge for over thirty years. In 2022 he moved to SOAS University of London, where he is a research professor. Chang is unusual among economists for how widely he is read. He writes bestselling books aimed at ordinary people, not just specialists. These include 'Kicking Away the Ladder' (2002), 'Bad Samaritans' (2007), '23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism' (2010), and 'Economics: The User's Guide' (2014). His more recent book 'Edible Economics' (2022) explains economic ideas through food. He has also advised governments and international organisations, including United Nations agencies and the World Bank. He is known as a 'heterodox' economist, meaning he works outside the mainstream, and he argues strongly that economics should be open to many different schools of thought.

Han Kang is a South Korean writer. In 2024 she became the first Asian woman, and the first Korean writer of any gender, to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was born on 27 November 1970 in the city of Gwangju in southern South Korea. According to her father, she is named after the Han River that flows through Seoul. Her family was full of writers. Her father, Han Seung-won, is a well-known novelist. Her two brothers also became novelists. Books filled their childhood home. Money, however, did not. Her father chose writing over a more secure career. When Han Kang was nine, the family moved from Gwangju to Seoul. Just four months later, in May 1980, the South Korean military launched a brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Gwangju. Hundreds, possibly up to two thousand, civilians were killed. Han did not witness the massacre, but a photograph her father showed her years later marked her deeply. The events of Gwangju have shaped much of her later writing. She has spoken of carrying a kind of survivor's guilt. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University in Seoul. She began publishing poetry in 1993 and her first novel in 1995. From 2007 to 2018 she taught creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. Her novel The Vegetarian (2007), translated into English by Deborah Smith in 2015, won the International Booker Prize in 2016 and made her internationally famous. The Nobel followed in 2024. She still lives in Seoul.