Han Kang’s latest novel, about a South Korean massacre, delves into why atrocities must be remembered. “It’s pain and it is blood, but it’s the current of life,” she said.

Proving skeptics wrong, he shared a Nobel Prize in 2013 for using computers to better understand chemical reactions and biological processes.

He grew up playing with model construction sets. As an adult, he tinkered with molecules instead, creating nanomachines and winning a Nobel Prize.