South Korean Han Kang receives the Nobel Prize for Literature

South Korean writer Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life,” the awards ceremony said 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. .

The first South Korean to win the literature prize, Han 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 for Yeosu.

In a telephone interview with the Academy after the award was announced, she said her celebrations would be low-key. “After this call, I would like to have tea with… I don’t drink, so I will have tea with my son, and I will celebrate quietly tonight.”

Han said she had just finished eating when she heard from the Academy. She said she was “so surprised and…I’m absolutely honored.”

She was born in 1970 and has a literary background; her father was a renowned novelist.

Author feels ‘uneasy’ about the success of The Vegetarian

Han won the Man Booker International Prize for Fiction for her novel The Vegetarian in 2016, the first of her novels to be translated into English and considered her major international breakthrough.

Throughout her writing, Han has explored the themes of grief, violence, sexuality and mental health.

In The VegetarianAfter struggling with horrific recurring nightmares, Yeong-hye, a dutiful woman, rebels against societal norms, giving up meat and raising concerns among her family that she is mentally ill.

“She is erotically and aesthetically exploited by her brother-in-law, a video artist who becomes obsessed with her passive body [and] …sinks deeper and deeper into a psychosis-like state manifested in the ‘flaming trees’, a symbol for a plant kingdom that is as alluring as it is dangerous,” reads the Academy’s description.

In an interview with the Booker Prizes published last year, Han described how writing The Vegetarian It had been a difficult period in her life when she wondered whether she should be able to finish the novel or even survive as an author.

“I was suffering from severe arthritis in my fingers, so I wrote the first two parts at a leisurely pace, with a felt-tip pen that slid smoothly across the paper, and then typed out the last part while holding two ballpoint pens upside down,” she said .

“To this day, I feel uneasy when I hear about the ‘success’ of the novel.”

Research on historical trauma

Her focus on historical trauma is explored in the novel Human actions by the 1980 massacre of hundreds of students and unarmed civilians by the South Korean army after a coup in the city of Gwangju, where she grew up.

Han told Swedish newspaper DN in an interview in 2017 that her family had struggled with survivors’ guilt over the events for years, after leaving the area a few months before the murders.

In We don’t divorceher latest novel to be published in English in 2025, Han “conveys the power of the past over the present,” and she chose it when asked in the phone interview with the Academy which book readers who are new to her work, should start.

“I think every writer likes his or her most recent book,” Han said. “Human actions is directly connected to this book. And then The White Book That is a very personal book for me, because it is quite autobiographical. And there is The Vegetarianbut I think it could be a start We don’t divorce.”

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol congratulated Han in a Facebook post: “You have turned the painful scars of our modern history into great pieces of literature.”

Two of her books have been made into films: The Vegetarian in 2009, directed by Lim Woo-Seong, and in 2011 Scarsfrom the same director.

Her 2002 novel Your cold handswhich contains clear glimpses of Han’s interest in art, “reproduces a manuscript left by a missing sculptor 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 edition, the translated version of which was published last year.

“There is a preoccupation with human anatomy and the play between persona and experience, creating in the sculptor’s work a conflict between what the body reveals and what it conceals,” the biography says.

The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and has a value of 11 million Swedish Krona, the equivalent of $1.45 million Cdn.

Prestigious winners from the past

The Nobel Prize was created by wealthy Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who dictated in his will that his estate be used to “fund prizes for those who have brought the greatest benefit to humanity during the past year.” The first prizes were awarded in 1901.

Previous literary winners include Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, Herman Hesse, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Neruda and Toni Morrison. Last year’s Nobel Prize was awarded Norwegian author and playwright Jon Fosse.

Over the years, the literature prize has also selected winners far outside the novelistic tradition, including playwrights, historians, philosophers and poets, even breaking new ground with the prize for singer-songwriter Bob Dylan in 2016.

The Nobel Prizes are awarded to the laureates on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday by the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo, while the Nobel Committee will announce this year’s prize for economic sciences on Monday.