South Korean author Han Kang has been honored with the 2024 Nobel Prize in literature.
Gatekeepers News reports that the announcement was made by Mats Malm, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel committee, in Stockholm on Thursday.
Kang, aged 53, is the first South Korean writer to receive this prestigious literary award. She also joins a select group of 18 women out of the 117 winners chosen since 1901.
The prize comes with a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million).
Best known for ‘The Vegetarian’, one of her first books to be translated into English, Kang was named the prize winner for her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.
“I was able to talk to Han Kang on the phone,” Malm said after announcing the winner.
“She was having an ordinary day it seemed, she had just finished supper with her son. She wasn’t really prepared for this, but we have begun to discuss preparations for December (when Han will be presented with the Nobel prize).”
In ‘The Vegetarian’, a three-part novel, Kang told a bone-chilling tale of a woman’s decision to stop eating meat and to live a more “plant-like” existence after suffering unsettling nightmares about human cruelty.
At the announcement ceremony, Anna-Karin Palm, a member of the Nobel committee for literature, said readers unfamiliar with Han’s work should begin with ‘Human Acts’.
It is a 2014 novel reflecting on the 1980 Gwangju uprising, when more than 100 civilians were killed during pro-democracy demonstrations led by students in the South Korean city.
The committee said her work is characterised by a “double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental and physical torment with close connections to Eastern thinking”.
Some of Kang’s works include The White Book and Greek Lessons.
