Han Kang becomes the first South Korean author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature

The Swedish Academy has done that promised the Nobel Prize for Literature Han Kangthe famous novelist and poet. At the announcement On Thursday morning, Nobel Committee Chairman Anders Olsson cited Han’s “intense poetic prose that confronts historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life.”

Han, 53, is the first writer from South Korea to receive the prestigious award. She is best known for her surreal novel from 2007 The Vegetarianthe three-part story of a woman who stops eating meat and experiences violent consequences. After the book’s English translation, Han became the first Korean author to win the award International Booker Prize in 2016.

In 2018, Han was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Human actions. The novel is set in the years after Uprising of 1980 against the South Korean government in the city of Gwangju, Han’s hometown.

“Han Kang uses this historical basis in a very special way,” says committee member Anna-Karin Palm interview after the announcement. “She has different characters reflect on these events, both then and in the present, and also shows how the living and the dead are always intertwined, and how these types of traumas linger in a population for generations.”

“Han Kang writes intense, lyrical prose that is both tender and brutal.” Literature Prize 2024

Born in 1970, Han grew up in a family that struggled financially (her father, Han Seung-won, was also a novelist) and moved many times. “It was too much for a small child,” Han said New York TimesAlexandra Alter in 2016. “But I was fine because I was surrounded by books.”

First published in a literary magazine in 1993, Han has been a celebrated author in South Korea for decades. In 2015, Deborah Smith‘s English translation of The Vegetarian brought Han to the international stage.

If Ankhi Mukherjeea literary scholar at the University of Oxford, says the Times‘ She gave lectures on Han’s work ‘year in, year out’ to Alter and Alex Marshall for almost twenty years.

“Her writing is relentlessly political – be it the politics of the body, of gender, of people fighting the state – but never abandons the literary imagination,” says Mukherjee. “It’s never hypocritical; it is very playful, funny and surreal.”

The Nobel Prize is one of the highest honors in the literary world. The winners will receive a cash prize of approximately $1 million, as well as an expected spike in publicity and book sales. The literary prize went to the Norwegian playwright and author Jon Fosse in 2023 and to the French author Annie Ernaux in 2022. In the past, critics have noted the lack of diversity among the winners.

As Paige Aniyah Morris, who is working on an upcoming translation of Han’s novel We don’t divorce with e. Yaewon, says the Washingtonpost‘Sophia Nguyen: ‘Korea has been waiting for a Nobel Prize for Literature for decades.’

“I imagine this is a long time coming especially for Korean readers and translators, and also as a promise that more doors will be wide open for Korean literature in the future,” she adds.

First reactions | Han Kang, Nobel Prize in Literature 2024 | Telephone interview

Han was at home in Seoul with her son when she received the news. As the author said on the phone interview with Nobel Prize collaborator Jenny Rydén, she was both surprised and honored. When asked about her literary inspirations, Han found it difficult to name names.

“For me, all writers since childhood are collective,” she said. “They are searching [for] meanings in life. Sometimes they are lost, and sometimes they are determined, and all their efforts and all their strengths have been my inspiration.