South Korean author Han Kang has won the 2024 Nobel Prize in literature “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.
Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Committee, announced the prize in Stockholm on Thursday.
Han, 53, is the first South Korean writer and 18th woman to win the Nobel Literature Prize.
Malm said he was able to talk to Han by phone after announcing her as the winner. “She was having an ordinary day it seemed – had just finished supper with her son. She wasn’t really prepared for this.”
“I’m so surprised and honoured,” Han said, adding, “I’d like to have tea with my son. I’ll celebrate it quietly.”
Nobel committee chairman Anders Olsson praised her “physical empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives” of her characters.
“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,” Olsson said.
Anna-Karin Palm, a committee member, said Han writes about “trauma, pain and loss”, whether individual or collective, “with the same compassion and care” and called her lyrical prose “both tender and brutal”.
The 2023 prize went to Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse, who was honoured for “his innovative plays and prose, which give voice to the unsayable”.
The literature prize has long been male-dominated. The last woman to win was Annie Ernaux of France, in 2022.
The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1m) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. Alongside the cash prize, the winners will be presented with a medal on December 10.
Life and work
Han was born in 1970 in the South Korean city of Gwangju before moving with her family to Seoul at the age of nine.
She comes from a literary background as her father, Han Seung-won, is a reputed novelist.
She began her career in 1993 with the publication of several poems in the magazine, Literature and Society, her prose debut coming in 1995 with the short story collection, Love of Yeosu.
Her major international breakthrough came in 2007 with the novel, The Vegetarian. Written in three parts, it is an unsettling novel in which a woman’s decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences.
In the 2014 novel, Human Acts, set in the city of Gwangju where she grew up, Han confronted her country’s history of state violence by giving voice to the victims of a massacre carried out by the South Korean military in 1980.
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”.
Mentioned as a case in point is her 2013 novel, Convalescence, which involves a leg ulcer that refuses to heal and a painful relationship between the main character and her dead sister.
“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 committee said.
Han is the second South Korean to win a Nobel Prize. Late former President Kim Dae-jung won the peace prize in 2000 for his efforts to restore democracy in South Korea during the country’s previous military rule and improve relations with war-divided rival North Korea.
