South Korea’s Han Kang awarded Nobel Prize in Literature
South Korean author Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,” the award-giving body said on Thursday.
“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,” said Anders Olsson, chairman of the academy’s Nobel Committee, in a statement.
Kang, the first South Korean 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.
Her major international breakthrough came with the The Vegetarian, first published in 2007. Among her previous accolades was the Man Booker International Prize in 2016, for that novel.
Two of her books have been made into films: The Vegetarian in 2009, directed by Lim Woo-Seong, and 2011’s Scars, by the same director.
Her 2002 novel Your Cold Hands, which contains clear glimpses of Kang’s interest in art, “reproduces a manuscript left behind by a missing sculptor who is obsessed with making plaster casts of female bodies,” the Academy said in an official biography.
Her 2011 novel Greek Lessons was her most recent English-language release, with the translated version published last year.
“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,” the biography says.
The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish krona, the equivalent of $1.45 million Cdn.
Prestigious past winners
The Nobel Prize was created by wealthy Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who in his will dictated that his estate should be used to fund “prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.” The first awards were given out in 1901.
Past literature winners have included Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, Herman Hesse, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Neruda and Toni Morrison. Last year’s Nobel was awarded to Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse.
Over the years, the literature prize has also picked winners well beyond the novelist tradition, including playwrights, historians, philosophers and poets, even breaking new ground with the award to singer-songwriter Bob Dylan in 2016.
The Nobel prizes are presented to the laureates on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced by the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel committee in Oslo on Friday, with the Nobel committee announcing this year’s economic sciences award on Monday.
