The 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature was on Thursday awarded to South Korean novelist Han Kang “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. She is 53, and is the first writer from South Korea to win the award.
The prestigious award, bestowed by 18 judges who make up the Swedish Academy, honours a writer’s entire body of work and is worth about Rs 8.2 crore.
The Nobel Prize website said: “In her oeuvre, Han Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. 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.”
Han Kang’s work comprises 11 published books, and consists of both fiction and poetry. Deborah Smith’s translation of her work, The Vegetarian, first brought her to the attention of English language readers, and was the inaugural winner of the International Booker Prize for translated books in 2016. Among her subsequent works to be translated into English are The White Book and Greek Lessons.
In 2023, Norwegian writer Jon Fosse won the prize for his innovative plays and prose that “give voice to the unsayable”.
This year, Nobel winners in physics, medicine and chemistry were announced earlier this week.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded on October 11 and the Nobel Prize in Economics will be announced on October 14. The prizes will be handed out to the winners on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.
