2024 Nobel Prize in literature awarded to South Korean author Han Kang

Han Kang was recognized for ‘her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas, exposes the fragility of human life,’ says Swedish Academy

The 2024 Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded to South Korean author Han Kang. Han was recognized for "her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life," the Nobel committee announced on Thursday. The author was born in 1970 in South Korea, where she still resides, as the daughter of a "reputed novelist," the committee said in a statement. It added that she was also interested in art and music. She began her career in 1993, and her "major international breakthrough came with the novel The Vegetarian," first published in 2007, which "portrays the violent consequences that ensue when its protagonist Yeong-hye refuses to submit to the norms of food intake," the statement read. The committee explained that "Han Kang’s work is characterized by this double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental and physical torment with close connections to Eastern thinking." The author 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," it noted.