Korean author Han Kang wins Nobel literature prize

STOCKHOLM – The South Korean author Han Kang has won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”, the award-giving body said on Thursday.
The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).
Han Kang, 53, is the first Asian female Nobel Prize laureate in Literature and the third Korean Nobel Prize laureate.
She won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction in 2016 for The Vegetarian, a novel about a woman’s descent into mental illness and neglect from her family. The novel was one of the first of her books to be translated into English.
Her 2017 autobiographical novel The White Book centres on the loss of her older sister, a baby who died two hours after her birth. In 2023, she published her fourth full-length novel, Greek Lessons. The Atlantic magazine called it a book in which “words are both insufficient and too powerful to tame”.
“She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose,” Anders Olsson, chairman of the Academy’s Nobel Committee, said in a statement.
Han Kang began her career in 1993 with the publication of a number of poems in the magazine Literature and Society, while her prose debut came in 1995 with the short story collection Love of Yeosu.
Born in 1970, she comes from a literary background, her father being a well-regarded novelist.
“I was able to talk to Han Kang over the phone,” Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy told a news conference on Thursday. “She was having an ordinary day, it seems, she had just finished supper with her son,” he said.
In The Vegetarian, after struggling with gruesome recurring nightmares, Yeong-hye, a dutiful wife, rebels against societal norms, forsaking meat and stirring concern among her family that she is mentally ill.
“She is exploited erotically and aesthetically by her brother-in-law, a video artist who becomes obsessed with her passive body (and) … sinks ever deeper into a psychosis-like condition expressed through the ‘flaming trees’, a symbol for a plant kingdom that is as enticing as it is dangerous,” according to the Academy’s description.
In an interview with the Booker Prizes published last year, Han Kang described how the writing of The Vegetarian had been a difficult period in her life where she questioned whether should be able to finish the novel or even survive as an author.
“I was suffering from severe arthritis in my fingers, so I wrote the first two parts at a leisurely pace, using a felt-tip pen that glided smoothly across the paper, and then typed out the last part holding two ballpoint pens upside down,” she said.
“To this day, I feel awkward when I hear about the novel’s ‘success’.”
Her focus on historical trauma is explored the novel Human Acts through a 1980 massacre of hundreds of students and unarmed civilians by the South Korean military in the city of Gwangju, where she herself grew up.
“In seeking to give voice to the victims of history, the book confronts this episode with brutal actualisation and, in so doing, approaches the genre of witness literature,” the Academy said.
In We Do Not Part, a novel due to be published in English in 2025, Han Kang “conveys the power of the past over the present”.
Two of her books have been made into films: The Vegetarian in 2009, directed by Lim Woo-Seong, and Scars, by the same director.
The Nobel prizes were created through a bequest in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel and began in 1901.
The literature prize is the most accessible of the Nobels for many and, as such, the Academy’s choices are met with praise and criticism, often in equal measure.
The Academy’s omission of literary giants such as Russia’s Leo Tolstoy, France’s Emile Zola and Ireland’s James Joyce has left many book-lovers scratching their heads over the last century.
The 2016 prize award to the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was hailed as radical rethink about what literature is, but also seen as a snub to authors in more traditional genres.
Even so, the prize money and a place on a list that includes luminaries such as the Irish poet WB Yeats, who won in 1923, American novelist Ernest Hemingway (1954) and Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1982) is an appealing proposition.
The Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse won in 2023.