South Korean writer Han Kang, was awarded 2024 the Nobel Prize in Literature, “for her intense 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 Gwangju, South Korea, in 1970. She comes from a literary background, her father being a reputed novelist. Han Kang began her career in 1993 with the publication of several poems in a South Korean magazine. Her prose debut came in 1995 with the short story collection.
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 committee said.
Han Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules 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 her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose, the Nobel Prize committee said.