South Korean author Han Kang wins 2024 Nobel Prize in literature | Arts and Culture News | The Round Table South Korean author Han Kang has triumphed the 2024 Nobel Prize in literature “for her intense poetic prose that competes historical traumas and discovers the fragility of human life”.
Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Committee, revealed the prize in Stockholm on Thursday.
Han, 53, is the first South Korean writer and 18th woman to gain the Nobel Literature Prize.
Malm revealed he was competent to verbalise to Han by phone after adjudging her as the winner. “She was having an ordinary day it seemed – had unbiased finished supper with her son. She wasn’t really devised for this.”
“I’m so surprised and honoured,” Han said, adding, “I’d like to have tea with my son. I’ll celebrate it quietly.”
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Nobel committee chairman Anders Olsson eulogized her “physical empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives” of her characters.
“She has a unique acumen 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,” Olsson said.
Anna-Karin Palm, a committee member, declared Han writes about “trauma, pain and loss”, whether individual or collective, “with the same sympathy and care” and summoned her lyrical prose “both juvenile and brutal”.
The 2023 prize went to Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse, who was honoured for “his modern plays and prose, which give voice to the unsayable”.
The literature prize has long been male-dominated. The latest woman to triumph was Annie Ernaux of France, in 2022.
The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1m) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. Alongside the cash prize, the winners will be presented with a medal on December 10.
Life and work
Han was born in 1970 in the South Korean city of Gwangju before moving with her family to Seoul at the age of nine.
She comes from a literary background as her father, Han Seung-won, is a reputed novelist.
She began her career in 1993 with the publication of several poems in the magazine, Literature and Society, her prose debut coming in 1995 with the short story collection, Love of Yeosu.
Her major international breakthrough came in 2007 with the novel, The Vegetarian. Written in three parts, it is an unsettling novel in which a woman’s decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences.
In the 2014 novel, Human Acts, set in the city of Gwangju where she grew up, Han competed her country’s history of state violence by giving voice to the victims of a massacre carried out by the South Korean military in 1980.
The committee disclosed her work is characterised by a “double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental and physical torment with close connections to Eastern thinking”.
Mentioned as a case in point is her 2013 novel, Convalescence, which involves a leg ulcer that rejects to heal and a painful relationship between the main character and her dead sister.
“She has a unique acumen 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,” the committee said.
Han is the second South Korean to prevail a Nobel Prize. Late former President Kim Dae-jung prevailed the peace prize in 2000 for his efforts to restore democracy in South Korea during the country’s previous military manage and reform relations with war-divided rival North Korea.
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Regards to Al Jazeera
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Published 10/10/2024