Nobel Prize in literature goes to South Korean author Han Kang
Fourth of this year’s awards recognizes writer for her ‘intense prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life’
The Nobel Prize in literature was awarded Thursday to South Korean author Han Kang for what the Nobel committee called “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Committee, announced the prize in Stockholm.
Han, 53, won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for “The Vegetarian,” an unsettling novel in which a woman’s decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences.
Her novel “Human Acts” was an International Booker Prize finalist in 2018.
Kang, the first South Korean 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.”
Bookmaker favorites ahead of the announcement included Chinese writer Can Xue and many other perennial possible candidates such as Kenya’s Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Australia’s Gerald Murnane, and Canada’s Anne Carson.
The literature prize is the most accessible of the Nobels for many and, as such, the Academy’s choices are met with praise and criticism, often in equal measure.
The Academy’s omission of literary giants such as Russia’s Leo Tolstoy, France’s Emile Zola, and Ireland’s James Joyce has left many book-lovers scratching their heads over the last century.
The 2016 prize award to American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was hailed as a radical rethink of what literature is, but also seen as a snub to authors in more traditional genres.
It has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers of style-heavy, story-light prose. It has also been male-dominated, with just 17 women among its 119 laureates so far. The last woman to win was Annie Ernaux of France, in 2022.
The prizes, for achievements in science, literature, and peace, were created through a bequest in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel. They have been awarded since 1901, with the final prize in the line-up – economics – being a later addition. The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million).
After peace, the literature award tends to garner the most attention, thrusting authors into the global spotlight and yielding a spike in book sales that can, however, be relatively short-lived for authors who are not household names.
Even so, the prize money and a place on a list that includes luminaries such as Irish poet W.B. Yeats, who won in 1923, American novelist Ernest Hemingway, who took the award in 1954, and Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner in 1982, is an appealing proposition.
Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse won in 2023.
Though a number of Jewish people have won the Nobel Prize for literature, only one Israeli has done so, author Shmuel Yosef Agnon in 1966.
Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of machine learning — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the physics prize on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, three scientists who discovered powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
The literature prize is the fourth to be announced each year.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on October 14.
The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.