South Korean experimental novelist Han Kang wins 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature

STOCKHOLM: South Korean author Han Kang has won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for her “intensely poetic prose that confronts historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life”, the prize-giving body said on Thursday.

The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish kroner ($1.1 million).

“She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and with her poetic and experimental style she has become an innovator in modern prose,” said Anders Olsson, chairman of the Academy’s Nobel Committee. .

Han Kang, the first South Korean woman to win the literary prize, began her career in 1993 by publishing a number of poems in Literature and Society magazine, while her prose debut came in 1995 with the short story collection “Love of Yeosu.” .

Born in 1970, she comes from a literary background, her father being a well-known novelist.

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 is considered her major international breakthrough.

In “The Vegetarian,” after struggling with horrific recurring nightmares, Yeong-hye, a dutiful wife, rebels against social norms by giving up meat and causes her family to worry that she is mentally ill.

Two of her books have been made into movies. “The Vegetarian” in 2009, directed by Lim Woo-Seong, and “Scars” in 2011, by the same director.

Her 2002 novel Your Cold Hands, which clearly traces Han Kang’s interest in art, reproduces a manuscript left behind by a lost sculptor who is obsessed with making plaster casts of women’s bodies.

“There is a preoccupation with human anatomy and the play between persona and experience, where a conflict emerges in the sculptor’s work between what the body reveals and what it conceals,” the Academy said in its official biography.

She is the second South Korean woman ever to win a Nobel Prize, following 2000 peace prize winner and former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung.

“Normal Day”

Betting favorites prior to the announcement included Chinese author Can Xue and several other perennial contenders including Kenya’s Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Australia’s Gerald Murnane and Canada’s Anne Carson.

“I was able to talk to Han Kang on the phone,” Mats Malm, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, told a press conference. “She was having an ordinary day, it seems, having just finished dinner with her son,” he said.

The literary prize is the most accessible of the Nobels for many, and as such the Academy’s selections are met with praise and criticism, often in equal measure.

The Academy’s omission of literary giants such as Russia’s Leo Tolstoy, France’s Emile Zola and Ireland’s James Joyce has left many bibliophiles scratching their heads over the past century.

The 2016 award to American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was hailed as a radical rethinking of what literature is, but it was also seen as a snub to writers in more traditional genres.

The prizes, for achievements in science, literature and peace, were created through a bequest in the will of Swedish inventor and dynamite entrepreneur Alfred Nobel. They have been awarded since 1901, with the last award in the lineup – financial – being a later addition.

After the peace, the literary prize tends to garner the most attention, bringing authors to the world stage and bringing a boost in book sales that can, however, be relatively short-lived for authors who are not well-known.

Even so, the prize money and a place on a list that includes the likes of Irish poet WB Yeats, who won in 1923, American novelist Ernest Hemingway, who took the prize in 1954, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez from Colombia, winner in 1982, is an attractive proposition.

Norwegian writer and playwright Jon Fosse won in 2023.

The fourth annual award, the literature prize follows those for medicine, physics and chemistry announced earlier this week.