South Korean writer Han Kang, was awarded 2024 the 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).
Han Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea, in 1970. She comes from a literary background, her father being a reputed novelist. She made her literary debut as a poet by publishing five poems, including “Winter in Seoul”, in the winter issue of Munhak-gwa-sahoe (Literature and Society) in 1993. She began her career as a novelist the next year by winning the 1994 Seoul Shinmun Spring Literary Contest with “Red Anchor”. She published her first short story collection entitled Yeosu (Munji Publishing Company) in 1995. She participated in the University of Iowa International Writing Program for three months in 1998 with support from the Arts Council Korea.
Her publications include a short story collection, Fruits of My Woman (2000), Fire Salamander (2012); novels such as Black Deer (1998), Your Cold Hands (2002), The Vegetarian (2007), Breath Fighting (2010), and Greek Lessons (2011), Human Acts (2014), The White Book (2016), I Do Not Bid Farewell(2021). A poem collection, I Put The Evening in the Drawer (2013) was published as well. Han Kang won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for ‘The Vegetarian’.
Her most recent novel ‘I Do Not Bid Farewell’ was awarded the Medicis prize in France in 2023, the Emile Guimet prize in 2024.
Han Kang’s work is characterized by this double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental and physical torment with close connections to Eastern thinking, the committee said.
Han Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. 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, the Nobel Prize committee said.
