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South Korean writer Han Kang has been announced as the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The author of The Vegetarian, The White Book, Human Acts and Greek Lessons was praised for “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.
After three days of Nobel prizes honouring work in the sciences, the literature award was announced by the Nobel Committee at the Swedish Academy on Thursday. The writer said she had “just finished supper with her son” when the news broke.
In an interview with The Independent last year, the 53-year-old spoke about her writing process explaining, “Language was like a double-bladed sword that I really wanted to grasp, but it wasn’t possible.”
Kang said that the “omnipresence” of violence has concerned her since she was young. The daughter of novelist Han Seung-won, she was born in Gwangju, a provincial city near the tip of the Korean peninsula.
Her family moved to Seoul when she was nine, four months before her birthplace was devastated by the Gwangju uprising, when peaceful protestors and bystanders were killed.
At the age of 12, Kang discovered a book about the massacre hidden at home. In it were photographs of mutilated faces and bayoneted bodies.
“I felt the fear and shock deeply inside me. It made me think how far humanity can go and still be human,” she said, explaining that it has since influenced her work.
“That has always stayed with me and it’s something I have to constantly recreate. It’s a conundrum, a fundamental question within me, so it comes out in whatever I write.”
BREAKING NEWS
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 10, 2024
The 2024 #NobelPrize in Literature is awarded to the South Korean author Han Kang “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” pic.twitter.com/dAQiXnm11z
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. The last woman to win was Annie Ernaux of France, in 2022.
Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of machine learning, John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, won the physics prize on Tuesday. On Wednesday, three scientists who discovered powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
Additional reporting by agencies
