The organization that bestows awards announced that South Korean writer 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 Swedish Academy awards the prize, which is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).
“Anders Olsson, the chairman of the academy’s Nobel Committee, said in a statement that she “has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and has become an innovator in contemporary prose with her poetic and experimental style.”
The first South Korean to win the literature prize, Han Kang started her career in 1993 by having several of her poems published in the magazine Literature and Society. Her debut in prose was the short story collection “Love of Yeosu,” which she published in 1995.
Her father, a well-known novelist, raised her in a literary family after her birth in 1970.
Han Kang’s novel “The Vegetarian” won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction in 2016 after receiving its first translation into English. This book is considered her major international breakthrough.
In “The Vegetarian,” Yeong-hye, a devout wife, rebels against society norms by giving up meat and raising suspicions among her family that she is mentally ill after suffering from horrifying recurrent nightmares.
Lim Woo-Seong has helmed the film adaptations of two of her books: “The Vegetarian” (2009) and “Scars” (2011).
A missing sculptor, obsessed with creating plaster casts of female bodies, left a manuscript that inspired Han Kang’s 2002 novel “Your Cold Hands”. It is clear that Han Kang was interested in art.
“There is a preoccupation with the human anatomy and the play between persona and experience, where a conflict arises in the work of the sculptor between what the body reveals and what it conceals,” according to an academy biography.
She is the second South Korean to ever win a Nobel Prize, after former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, who received the 2000 Peace Prize.
