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.”
Nobel committee chairman Anders Olsson praised Han ’s “physical empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives” of her characters.
He said her work “confronts historical traumas and in each of her works exposes the fragility of human life. She 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.”
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.
'Lyrical prose'
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, 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.
At the time of winning that award, Han said 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."
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 prize criticism
The literature prize 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 until this year's award. The last woman to win was Annie Ernaux of France, in 2022.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.
The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
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