The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to South Korean author Han Kang (53) on October 10, 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 will receive the 11 million-krona ($1.1 million) award, the Swedish Academy stated.
Nobel committee chairman Anders Olsson praised the author’s “physical empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives” of her characters. He said her work “has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in a poetic and experimental style, has become an innovator in contemporary prose.”
In 2023, the award went to Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, whose plays are among the most widely staged of any contemporary playwright in the world.
A historic win
Han becomes the first South Korean writer to win the Nobel literature prize. She also becomes the second South Korean national to win a Nobel Prize, after late former President Kim Dae-jung won the peace prize in 2000. He was honored for his efforts to restore democracy in South Korea during the country’s previous military rule and improve relations with war-divided rival North Korea.
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Han made her publishing debut as a poet in 1993; her first short story collection was published the following year and her first novel, Black Deer, in 1998. Works translated into English include The Vegetarian, Greek Lessons, Human Acts, and The White Book, a poetic novel that draws on the death of Han’s older sister shortly after birth. The White Book was an International Booker Prize finalist in 2018.
She 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. At the time of winning that award, Han said that writing novels is a way of questioning for me. “I just try to complete my questions through the process of my writing and I try to stay in the questions, sometimes painful, sometimes-well-sometimes demanding,” she said.
With The Vegetarian, she said, ”I wanted to question about being human and I wanted to describe a woman who desperately didn’t want to belong to the human race any longer and desperately wanted to reject being human, (humans) who commit such violence.”
Han Kang won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for The Vegetarian, a novel in which a woman’s decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences.
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Her novel Human Acts was an International Booker Prize finalist in 2018. Olsson, the committee chair, called Human Acts a work of “witness literature”. It is based on the real-life killing of pro-democracy protesters in Han’s home city of Gwangju in 1980. Nobel Literature committee member Anna-Karin Palm said Han writes “intense lyrical prose that is both tender and brutal, and sometimes slightly surrealistic as well”.
Han wins the Nobel at a time of growing global influence of South Korean culture, which in recent years has included the success of films like director Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning Parasite, the Netflix survival drama Squid Game, and the worldwide fame of K-pop groups like BTS and BLACKPINK.
Reformed tradition
The Literature Prize has long faced criticism that it is too focussed 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 until this year’s award. The last woman to win was Annie Ernaux of France in 2022.
The Swedish Academy has undergone major reforms since a devastating #MeToo scandal in 2018, vowing a more global and gender-equal literature prize. Since the scandal, it has honoured four women including Han—the others are Annie Ernaux of France, US poet Louise Gluck, and Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk—and three men in Austrian author Peter Handke, Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah and Fosse.
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Six days of Nobel announcements opened on October 7 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 October 8, and three scientists who discovered powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on October 9. Along with the prize sum, the Nobel Prize comes with a diploma and a gold medal.
Annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, who died in 1896. A prize in economic sciences was added by Sweden’s central bank in 1968.
The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on December 10, Nobel’s death anniversary.
(with inputs from agencies)
