South Korean author Han Kang 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).
“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, opens new tab, the first South Korean and the 18th woman to win the literature prize, 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”.
In a telephone interview with the Academy after the prize was announced, she said her celebrations would be low-key. “After this phone call I’d like to have tea with – I don’t drink so – I’m going to have tea with my son and I’ll celebrate it quietly tonight.”
Simon Prosser, Publishing Director at Hamish Hamilton (UK), the UK publisher of Han Kang’s novel “Greek Lessons” said in a statement via the Korean Cultural Centre UK:
“In writing of exceptional beauty and clarity, she faces unflinchingly the painful question of what it means to be human – to be of a species which is simultaneously capable of acts of cruelty and acts of love.”
‘THE VEGETARIAN’
Throughout her writing, Han Kang has explored the themes of grief, violence, sexuality and mental health.
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.
