South Korean novelist Han Kang wins Nobel literature prize

Stockholm — South Korean author Han Kang has won the 2024 Nobel prize for literature for “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”, the award-giving body said on Thursday.

“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,” Anders Olsson, chair of the academy’s Nobel Committee, said in a statement.

Han, the first South Korean and the 18th woman to win the literature prize, began her career in 1993 with the publication of a number of poems in the magazine Literature and Society, while her prose debut came in 1995 with the short story collection Love of Yeosu.

In a telephone interview with the academy after the prize was announced, she said her celebrations would be low key. “After this phone call I’d like to have tea with — I don’t drink — so I’m going to have tea with my son and I’ll celebrate it quietly tonight.”

Han said she had just finished dinner when she heard from the academy. She said she was “so surprised and ... absolutely I’m honoured”.

The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11-million Swedish kronor ($1.1m).

Born in 1970, she comes from a literary background, her father being a well-regarded novelist.

Han won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction for her novel The Vegetarian in 2016, the first of her novels to be translated into English and regarded as her major international breakthrough.

Simon Prosser, publishing director at Hamish Hamilton (UK), the UK publisher of Han’s novel Greek Lessons, said in a statement via the Korean Cultural Centre UK: “In writing of exceptional beauty and clarity, she faces unflinchingly the painful question of what it means to be human — to be of a species which is simultaneously capable of acts of cruelty and acts of love.”

Throughout her writing, Han has explored the themes of grief, violence, sexuality and mental health.

In The Vegetarian, after struggling with gruesome recurring nightmares, Yeong-hye, a dutiful wife, rebels against societal norms, forsaking meat and stirring concern among her family that she is mentally ill.

“She is exploited erotically and aesthetically by her brother-in-law, a video artist who becomes obsessed with her passive body (and) ... sinks ever deeper into a psychosis-like condition expressed through the ‘flaming trees’, a symbol for a plant kingdom that is as enticing as it is dangerous,” according to the academy’s description.

In an interview with the Booker Prizes published in 2023, Han described how the writing of The Vegetarian had been a difficult period in her life where she questioned whether should be able to finish the novel or even survive as an author.

“I was suffering from severe arthritis in my fingers, so I wrote the first two parts at a leisurely pace, using a felt-tip pen that glided smoothly across the paper, and then typed out the last part holding two ballpoint pens upside down,” she said.

“To this day, I feel awkward when I hear about the novel’s ‘success’”

Historical trauma

Her focus on historical trauma is explored in the novel Human Acts through the 1980 massacre of hundreds of students and unarmed civilians by the South Korean military after a coup d’etat in the city of Gwangju, where she herself grew up.

Han told Sweden’s DN daily in an interview in 2017 the events had left her family struggling with survivors’ guilt for years, after they had left the area a few months before the killings.

In We Do Not Part, her latest novel due to be published in English in 2025, Han “conveys the power of the past over the present”, and she chose it when asked in the telephone interview with the academy which book readers new to her work should start with.

“I think every writer likes his or her most recent book,” Han said. “Human Acts is connected directly with this book. And then The White Book, which is very personal book for me, because it is quite autobiographical. And there is The Vegetarian, but I feel the start could be We Do Not Part.”

South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol congratulated Han in a Facebook post: “You have turned the painful scars of our modern history into great pieces of literature.”

The award also prompted a rush of interest for book-lovers at home.

“I was having dinner with my friends, and just then I got the news ... I felt so good, so I paid for my friend’s meal and ran just to come here to get books written by Han Kang,” said Kim Hanna, speaking at a bookstore in Seoul.

The Nobel prizes were created through a bequest in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel and began in 1901.

Past winners of the literature prize include luminaries such as Irish poet WB Yeats, American novelist Ernest Hemingway and Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Reuters