[The JRB Daily] South Korean author Han Kang receives the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to fifty-three-year-old South Korean novelist Han Kang.

Han, whose works include The Vegetarian, The White Book, Human Acts and Greek Lessons, was awarded the prize for her ‘intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life’.

At the prize announcement, Swedish Academy permanent secretary Mats Malm said: ‘I was able to talk to Han Kang on the phone. She was having an ordinary day it seems, had just finished supper with her son. She wasn’t really prepared for this, but we have begun to discuss preparations for December [when Han will be presented with the Nobel Prize]. We look very much forward to meeting her here then.’

Han is the first South Korean author and eighteenth woman to win the prize since its inception in 1901. Her win was something of a surprise, the bookmakers’ favorites for this year’s award being genre-defying avant-garde Chinese writer Can Xue, Australian novelist Gerald Murnane and perenial favourite Haruki Murakami. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Mia Couto, Nuruddin Farah, Scholastique Mukasonga and Ivan Vladislavić were among the African authors tipped with a chance.

The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and 11 million Swedish kronor (about R18.5 million).

Han was born in 1970, and grew up in the South Korean cities of Gwangju and Seoul. Her brother, Han Dong Rim, is also a writer, as is her father, Han Seung-won. Han’s literary career began in 1993, when a number of her poems were published in the magazine Literature and Society. She published her first work of prose, the short story collection Love of Yeosu, in 1995.

But it was her novel The Vegetarian that catapulted Han into the international spotlight. The book was published in South Korea in 2007, with an English translation following in 2015. The Vegetarian won the 2016 International Booker Prize, for its ‘uncanny blend of beauty and horror’, and has been translated into twenty-three languages. The book was acclaimed by readers and critics, with Daniel Hahn of The Guardian writing: ‘Sentence by sentence, The Vegetarian is an extraordinary experience.’

Han’s most recent work in English translation is Greek Lessons, her fourth full-length novel, which was released in 2023. The Nobel committee called it ‘a beautiful meditation around loss, intimacy and the ultimate conditions of language’. Her forthcoming novel, We Do Not Part, which won the French prix Médicis Étranger in 2023, will be published in English in 2025.

Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee, 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.’

Last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Norwegian playwright, novelist and poet Jon Fosse.

Header image: Nobel Prize

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.Required fields are marked *