South Korea’s Han Kang awarded 2024 Nobel Prize in literature

STOCKHOLM – Han Kang, the South Korean author best known for The Vegetarian, was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature on Oct 10 – the first writer from her country to receive the major award.

Professor Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy that organises the prize, said at a news conference in Stockholm that she won “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.

Han’s best-known book, The Vegetarian, published in South Korea in 2007,

won the 2016 International Booker Prize

after it was translated into English.

In the surreal novel, a depressed housewife shocks her family when she stops eating meat. Later, she starves herself, thinking that she can feed off sunlight.

Novelist Porochista Khakpour, in a review of The Vegetarian for The New York Times, said that Han “has been rightfully celebrated as a visionary in South Korea”.

Han’s Nobel was a surprise. Before the announcement, the bookmakers’ favourite for the 2024 award was Can Xue, an avant-garde Chinese writer of category-defying novels.

Surrounded by books

Han was born in 1970 in Gwangju, South Korea. Her father was also a novelist, but much less successful.

The family struggled financially and moved frequently. In a 2016 interview with The Times, Han said her transitory upbringing “was too much for a little child, but I was all right because I was surrounded by books”.

When Han was nine, her family moved to Seoul just months before the Gwangju uprising in 1980, when government troops fired on crowds of pro-democracy protesters, killing hundreds.

The event shaped her views on humanity’s capacity for violence, she said in the 2016 interview, and its spectre has haunted her writing. In her 2014 novel Human Acts, for instance, a writer observes a police raid on a group of activists.

Han studied literature at Yonsei University in South Korea, and her first published works were poems.

‘Innovator in contemporary prose’

Her debut novel, Black Deer, which came out in 1998, was a mystery about a missing woman. In the 2016 interview, Han said it was around that time that she developed the idea for a short story about a woman who becomes a plant, which she eventually developed into The Vegetarian.

Han’s other novels include The White Book, which was also nominated for the International Booker Prize, and

Greek Lessons

, published in English in 2023.

In Greek Lessons, a woman loses her ability to speak and tries to restore it by learning ancient Greek. Novelist Idra Novey, in a review for The Times, called the novel “a celebration of the ineffable trust to be found in sharing language”.

Nobel Committee chair Anders Olsson said in a statement that Han, in her writing, “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”.

A capstone

The Nobel Prize is literature’s pre-eminent award, and winning it is a capstone to a writer, poet or playwright’s career.

Past recipients have included author Toni Morrison, playwright Harold Pinter and, in 2016, singer Bob Dylan.

Along with the prestige and a huge boost in sales, the new laureate receives 11 million Swedish krona (S$1.4 million).

In recent years, the academy has tried to increase the diversity of authors considered for the literature prize, after facing criticism over the low number of laureates who were female or came from outside Europe and North America.

Since 2020, the academy has awarded the prize to one person of colour – Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian writer whose novels dissect the legacy of colonialism – as well as two women: Louise Gluck, the American poet, and Annie Ernaux, the French writer of autobiographical works.

The 2023 recipient was Jon Fosse, a Norwegian author and playwright whose novels, told in lengthy sentences, often contain religious undertones. NYTIMES