South Korean author Han Kang was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her deeply poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).
Han Kang was born in 1970 in Gwangju, South Korea. She comes from a literary background, her father being a distinguished novelist. He made his literary debut as a poet in 1993 by publishing five poems, including “Winter in Seoul”, in the winter issue of Munak-gwa-saho (Literature and Society). He began his career as a novelist by winning the following year. 1994 Seoul Shinmun Spring Literary Contest with “Red Anchor”. He published his first short story collection titled Yeosu (Munji Publishing Company) in 1995. He attended the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program for three months in 1998 with the support of Arts Council Korea.
His publications include a short story collection, Fruits of My Woman (2000), Fire Salamander (2012); Black Deer (1998), Your Cold Hands (2002), The Vegetarian (2007), Breath Fighting (2010), and novels such as Greek Lessons (2011), Human Acts (2014), The White Book (2016), I Do Farewell No (2021). A poetry collection, I Put the Evening in the Drawer (2013), was also published. Han Kang won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for ‘The Vegetarian’.
His most recent novel ‘I Do Not Bid Farewell’ was awarded the Médicis Prize in France in 2023, the Emile Guimet Prize in 2024.
Han Kang’s work is characterized by the dual display of pain, a correspondence between mental and physical suffering with close connections to Eastern thinking, the committee said.
Han Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of his works, exposes the fragility of human life. The Nobel Prize Committee said she has a unique awareness of the relationship between body and soul, the living and the dead, and has become an innovator in contemporary prose in her poetic and experimental style.
