Yoopya with Reuters
Born in 1970, Han Kang comes from a literary background, her father being a well-regarded novelist.
In her Booker International Prize-winning novel “The Vegetarian”, after struggling with gruesome recurring nightmares, Yeong-hye, a dutiful wife, rebels against societal norms, forsaking meat and stirring concern among her family that she is mentally ill.
Two of Han Kang’s 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 bears obvious traces of Han Kang’s interest in art, reproduces a manuscript left behind by a missing sculptor who is obsessed with making plaster casts of female bodies.
Han Kang is only the second South Korean to win a Nobel prize. The only other was former President Kim Dae-jung, who won the 2000 peace prize
South Korean author Han Kang has won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.
The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).
“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,” Anders Olsson, chairman of the academy’s Nobel Committee, said in a statement.
Han 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.
Han Kang 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 regarded as her major international breakthrough.
The literature prize is the most accessible of the Nobels for many and, as such, the Academy’s choices are met with praise and criticism, often in equal measure.
The literature award tends to garner the most attention, thrusting authors into the global spotlight and yielding a spike in book sales that can, however, be relatively short-lived for authors who are not household names.
Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse won in 2023.
Other past winners include Irish poet W.B. Yeats, who won in 1923, American novelist Ernest Hemingway, who took the award in 1954, and Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner in 1982.
The literature prize is the fourth Nobel award to be handed out, following the prizes for medicine, physics and chemistry earlier this week.
Han Kang’s ‘rich and complex’ work
Anna-Karin Palm, member of Nobel Committee for Literature 2024
On Han Kang’s work
- “This is a very rich and complex oeuvre that spans many genres, and Han Kang writes this really intense, lyrical prose that is both tender and brutal and sometimes slightly surrealistic as well.”
- “There’s a continuity as to themes that is quite remarkable, but at the same time, a huge stylistic variation that makes every book a new aspect or a new expression of these central themes.”
What book by Han Kang would you recommend starting with?
- “I would say the book Human Acts from 2014. It’s a very moving, sometimes terrible story, because it’s based on a historical event of a massacre when the military in South Korea, 1980, killed over 100 students and civilians that were demanding democracy and human rights.”
- “Han Kang uses this historical base in a very special way… [she] shows how the living and the dead are always intertwined, and how these kind of traumas stay in a population, for generations, sometimes.”
- “Especially effective in this book, I would say, is her very tender and precise prose that, in itself, almost becomes a counterforce to this brutal noisiness of power.”
By Kylie Maclellan, Kate Abnett, Rupam Jain, Farouq Suleiman, Deborah Kyvrikosaios and Marc Jones
