The 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Han Kang, a South Korean author, for her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
Han, 53, began her writing career with poems in a South Korean magazine and made her prose debut in 1995 with a short story collection. She later gained international attention with The Vegetarian, a novel about a woman who decides to live a more “plant-like” existence after dark dreams of human cruelty. The novel won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016.
Han is the first South Korean author to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature and only the 18th woman to win it since 1901. The award, announced in Sweden on Thursday, comes with a prize of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million).
The Swedish Academy praised Han for her “unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead,” and called her writing “poetic and experimental,” making her a leading figure in modern prose.
