South Korean author Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”, the award-giving body said on Thursday.
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 and the 18th woman to win the literature prize, began her career in 1993 with the publication of a number of poems in the magazine Literature and Society, 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-regarded 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 regarded as her major international breakthrough.
Bookmakers’ favorites ahead of the announcement had included Chinese writer Can Xue and many other perennial possible candidates such as Kenya’s Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Australia’s Gerald Murnane, and Canada’s Anne Carson.
Han Kang had not been widely backed, though South Korean poet Ko Un has been regularly tipped to win the prize in recent years and was again among those seen as in with a chance.
