South Korean writer Han Kang awarded 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2024 has been awarded to South Korean author Han Kang, who used her intense poetic prose to expose the fragility of human life through a narrative of historical traumas.

Han Kang, the second South Korean to win a Nobel Prize and the first South Korean to win the Nobel Prize for literature. The 2007 book, `The Vegetarian’, also brought her international recognition.

Han Kang contributed much to modern prose by her unique ways of connecting the body and the soul and the dead and the use of invisible tools to confront historical traumas.

The Swedish Academy described Han Kang’s writing as rich and complex intense, tender and at the same time brutal.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol congratulated Han Kang on winning the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature. He said the reason for the selection – the intensity of her poetic pose used to expose human fragility – through description of historical traumas, helped to raise the value of Korean literature.

Her Nobel Prize winning novel, `The Vegetarian’, which also brought her the Booker International Prize, describes the struggles of Yeong-hye, a dutiful wife, who was forced to rebel following gruesome recurring nightmares, while her family considers her as mentally ill.

`The Vegetarian’ has been made into film in 2009 with Lim Woo-Seong as director and another book `Scars’, by the same director, in 2011.

Another Han Kang novel, ‘Your Cold Hands’, written in 2002, which brings to light her interest in art, reproduces a manuscript left behind by a missing sculptor who is obsessed with making plaster casts of female bodies.

The other Koren Nobel Laureate was former President Kim Dae-jung, who won the 2000 peace prize