India, Aug. 1 -- For nearly two decades now, the South Korean Nobel laureate has built one of the most haunting literary oeuvres of contemporary world literature. Whether in The Vegetarian, Human Acts, The White Book, or Greek Lessons, she has consistently explored the uneasy relationship between violence and tenderness, memory and erasure, the body and its wounds. Her prose does not announce itself loudly. It arrives quietly, almost hesitantly, carrying within it the tremors of unspeakable histories.

Her new nonfiction collection, Light and Thread, published after her historic Nobel Prize in Literature, feels like entering the private interior of that inward stillness.

Published by Hamish Hamilton, the book includes essays, poems, diar...