The award-giving organization announced on Thursday ( October 10 ) that South Korean author Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
The Swedish Academy gave the prize, which is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ( US$ 1.1 million ).
” She has a special knowledge of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her literary and experimental design has become an entrepreneur in modern prose”, Anders Olsson, president of the school’s Nobel Committee, said in a statement.
Han Kang, the first North Korean to get a literary award, made her debut in 1995 with the short story collection Like of Yeosu, and she began her career in 1993 with the release of a number of writings in the newspaper Literature and Society.
Born in 1970, she comes from a literary history, her parents being a well-regarded writer.
Han Kang’s book” The Vegetarian,” which was the first of her books to become translated into English and regarded as her key international discovery, won the Gentleman Booker International Prize for fiction in 2016.
In” The Vegetarian”, after struggling with horrible recurring nightmares, Yeong-hye, a obedient wife, rebels against political norms, neglecting flesh and stirring issue among her home that she is mentally ill.
Two of her books have been made into films:” The Vegetarian” in 2009, directed by Lim Woo-seong, and 2011’s” Scars”, by the same director.
Her 2002 novel” Your Cold Hands,” which shows obvious Han Kang’s interest in art, is a reprint of a manuscript that a missing sculptor was obsessed with creating plaster casts of female bodies.
The play between persona and experience and the preoccupation with the human anatomy is at the center of the sculptor’s work, according to the Academy’s official biography.
She is the second South Korean to ever receive a Nobel Prize, joining Kim Dae-jung, a former South Korean president, and the 2000 Nobel Prize winner.
” ORDINARY DAY”
Chinese author Can Xue and a number of other enduring potential candidates before the announcement, including Gerald Murnane from Australia, Anne Carson from Canada, and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o from Kenya, were bookmaker favorites.
” I was able to talk to Han Kang over the phone”, Mats Malm, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy told a press conference.
” She was having an ordinary day, it seems, she had just finished supper with her son”, he said.
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 Academy’s omission of literary giants such as Russia’s Leo Tolstoy, France’s Emile Zola and Ireland’s James Joyce has left many book-lovers scratching their heads over the last century.
The 2016 Grammy Award for American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was hailed as a radical rethink of what literature is, but it was also seen as a rejection of authors in more traditional genres.
The prizes were established as a result of a bequest in the Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel’s will for accomplishments in science, literature, and peace. They have been awarded since 1901, with the final prize in the line-up- economics- being a later addition.
After peace, the literature award typically receives the most recognition, putting authors in the spotlight around the world and resulting in a rise in book sales that can be a little short-lived for authors who are not well-known.
Even so, the prize money and a place on a list that includes luminaries such as Irish poet WB Yeats, who won in 1923, American novelist Ernest Hemingway, who took the award in 1954, and Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner in 1982, is an appealing proposition.
Jon Fosse, a Norwegian author and dramatist, won in 2023.
The literature prize follows those for medicine, physics, and chemistry, which were announced earlier this week. It is the fourth award to be given out annually.