The Nobel Prize in Literature 2024 is awarded to the South Korean novelist Han Kang “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” Her key works include The Vegetarian, The White Book, Human Acts, and Greek Lessons.
The Swedish Academy announced the winner today, October 10; the prize is handed out with a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor, about $1.1 million. The official ceremony will be on December 10.
Nobel Committee chairman Anders Olsson hailed Han Kang’s contribution to literature: “Through her work, she has faced historical traumas and the invisible rules that have governed life and still do so while revealing the fragility of human existence.
“She has an extraordinary awareness of the links between the body and soul, between the living and the dead, and the poetic and experimental style has made her an original among the writers of contemporary prose,”
Olsson said.
Han Kang was born in 1970 in Gwangju, South Korea, and moved to Seoul at the age of nine. She comes from a family of writers- her father was a well-known novelist- and has been heavily involved with writing and the arts since an early age, an obvious fact which underlies much of her oeuvre.
Her writing career began in 1993 with several poems published in Literature and Society; in 1995, her first book of prose-a collection of short stories titled Love of Yeosu-was published. The now internationally acclaimed novel The Vegetarian by Han was published in 2007; translated into English in 2015, it won the International Booker Prize in 2016.
The Nobel Prize was initiated by the wealthy inventor Alfred Nobel to recognize persons who have achieved extraordinary work that benefited mankind immensely. Nobel died in 1895, but it wasn’t until 1901-after a court battle over the terms of his will-that the first prizes were doled out.
These prizes were given respectively by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for Chemistry and Physics, the Swedish Academy for Literature, Sweden’s Karolinska Institute for Physiology or Medicine, and the Norwegian Parliament for Peace.
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023 went to Jon Fosse “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.”.
