South Korean writer Han Kang has won the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2024. The Swedish Academy hailed the 54-year-old writer “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.

Her literary career began with a book of poems but her breakthrough novel is The Vegetarian, first published in Korean in 2007, and translated into English by Deborah Smith in 2015. It immediately scooped up many honours including the Man Booker International Prize in 2016.

The Nobel Prize 2024: an interactive guide

The story revolves around a woman and the consequences of her decision to give up eating meat. As the protagonist Yeong-hye defends her radical stand, and small act of independence, her family reacts in extraordinary, violent ways to make her change her mind. The obsessive tale has been compared to Kafka’s nightmarish stories, and all her books since have been widely welcomed in the English-speaking world.

The Swedish Academy highlighted her “physical empathy for extreme life stories,” evident in her novels like Greek Lessons (2023/2011), a relationship between an individual who has lost the power of speech, and another, who is losing his power to see; Human Acts, 2016, her most political novel about a massacre of unarmed civilians, The White Book (2017), which was also shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, and deals with the death of the baby sister of an unnamed narrator, told in fragments, using the colour of grief, white.

Her new book, We Do Not Part, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris is going to be published in early 2025; it tells the story of a friendship of two women in the backdrop of a hidden chapter of Korean history.

Korean culture, think k-pop and k-drama, has been sweeping the world and in the literary sphere too it has been making waves. The major fiction prize, The Booker Prize, has seen several Korean writers being shortlisted in the past few years from Bora Chung, Hwang Sok-yong to Cheon Myeong-kwan, with Han Kang going on to win it.

Last year, the Prize went to Norwegian writer Jon Fosse whose oeuvre is filled with the “mysticism” of ordinary life, and the Swedish Academy called for a celebration of his “innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.”