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.
Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Committee, announced the prize in Stockholm.
Kang, 53, won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for “The Vegetarian", an unsettling novel in which a woman’s decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences.
Her novel “Human Acts” was an International Booker Prize finalist in 2018.
"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.
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 so far. The last woman to win was Annie Ernaux of France, in 2022.
The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).
The prizes, for achievements in science, literature and peace, were created through a bequest in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel. They have been awarded since 1901.
After peace, the literature award tends to garner the most attention, thrusting authors into the global spotlight and yielding a spike in book sales that can, however, be relatively short-lived for authors who are not household names.
Even so, the prize money and a place on a list that includes luminaries such as Irish poet W.B. Yeats, who won in 1923, American novelist Ernest Hemingway, who took the award in 1954, and Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner in 1982, is an appealing proposition.
Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse won in 2023.
The fourth award to be handed out every year, the literature prize follows those for medicine, physics and chemistry announced earlier this week.
(FRANCE 24 with AP and Reuters)
