South Korean author Han Kang has won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,” Reuters reports.
The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).
“She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose,” Anders Olsson, chairman of the academy’s Nobel Committee, said in a statement.
Han 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.
Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction for her novel “The Vegetarian” in 2016, the first of her novels to be translated into English and regarded as her major international breakthrough.
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 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.
Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse won in 2023.
Other past winners include 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.
The literature prize is the fourth Nobel award to be handed out, following the prizes for medicine, physics and chemistry earlier this week.
