South Korea’s Han Kang wins 2024 Nobel Prize in literature

The Swedish Academy reports that 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.”

She began her career in 1993 with the publication of several poems in the magazine Literature and Society, her prose debut coming in 1995 with the short story collection, Love of Yeosu.

The Nobel committee noted that Han Kang confronts historical traumas and obscure set of regulations in each of her works, which highlights the fragility of human life.

She “has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead,” according to her poetic and experimental prose.

Her major international breakthrough came with the novel, The Vegetarian. An unsettling novel about a woman who decides to stop eating meat has devastating effects that is broken down into three parts.

According to the committee, her work has “double exposure of pain, a relationship between mental and physical torment, and strong connections to Eastern thinking.”

The 2023 prize went to Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse, who was honoured for “his innovative plays and prose, which give voice to the unsayable”.

The literature prize has long been male-dominated, with just 17 women among its laureates. The last woman to win was Annie Ernaux of France, in 2022.

The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1m) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The winners will receive a medal on December 10 in addition to the cash prize.