Han Kang has been named the 2024 Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature, the first Asian woman and the first writer from South Korea to receive the award.
Han was selected ¡°for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,¡± the Swedish Academy said in its announcement on Thursday.
Writer and committee member Ann-Karin Palm noted Han¡¯s ¡°really intense lyrical prose that is both tender and brutal and sometimes surreal,¡± and praised the author¡¯s ability to span genres and traverse varied stylistic expressions.
Han¡¯s breakout work was ¡°The Vegetarian,¡± published first in 2007, a slim but visceral and affecting novel about a woman who quietly rebels against her domestic life by giving up eating meat. Though it begins with a simple refusal, the novel spirals into an increasingly bizarre and at times violent book about the autonomy of a woman¡¯s body. Han and her English translator Deborah Smith won the Man Booker International Prize for the work in 2016.
Han was born in 1970 in Gwangju, the site of brutal military killings of hundreds of students and civilians in 1980, which she explores in her 2014 novel, ¡°Human Acts.¡± Like the protagonist of ¡°The Vegetarian,¡± writes Jiayang Fan in The New Yorker, a character in the book realizes ¡°her survival has not been a triumph but its opposite, because it has come at the cost of her dignity.¡±
¡°The White Book,¡± published in 2016, is an experimental and fragmented stream of grief for the narrator¡¯s sister who died hours after being born, as told through white objects. ¡°Han Kang¡¯s work is characterized by this double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental and physical torment with close connections to Eastern thinking,¡± the Academy notes.
Han will receive a prize of 11 million Swedish krona (about ?157,500,000). Last year¡¯s winner was Norwegian playwright and author Jon Fosse, selected for his ¡°innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.¡±
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