The 2024 Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded to Han Kang, a South Korean author, for her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
Han, 53, began her career with a group of poems in a South Korean magazine, before making her prose debut in 1995 with a short story collection.
She later began writing longer prose works, most notably “The Vegetarian,” one of her first books to be translated into English. The novel, which won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016, charts a young woman’s attempt to live a more “plant-like” existence after suffering macabre nightmares about human cruelty.
Han is the first South Korean author to win the literature prize, and just the 18th woman out of the 117 prizes awarded since 1901. The prize, announced in Sweden on Thursday (Oct 9), carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor.
The literature prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers of style-heavy, story-light prose. It has also been male-dominated, with just 17 women among its 119 laureates so far. The last woman to win was Annie Ernaux of France, in 2022.
