Han Kang is the first South Korean author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature

The Swedish Academy has awarded Han Kang, the renowned writer and poet, with the Nobel Prize for Literature. Making the announcement Thursday morning, Nobel Committee Chairman Anders Olsson cited Han's “intense poetic prose that grapples with historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life.”

Han, 53, is the first writer from South Korea to receive the prestigious award. She is best known for her 2007 surrealist novel The vegetarianthe three-part story of a woman who stops eating meat and suffers violent consequences. After translating the book into English, Han became the first Korean author to win the International Booker Prize in 2016.

In 2018, Han was also nominated for the Booker Prize Human actions. The novel is set in the years following the uprising against the South Korean government in 1980 in the city of Gwangju – Han's hometown.

“Han Kang is using this historic base in a very special way,” committee member Anna-Karin Palm said in an interview after the announcement. “It allows various characters to reflect on these events, then and now, and also shows how the living and the dead are always connected and how such traumas remain in a population across generations.”

“Han Kang writes intense, lyrical prose that is both tender and brutal.” 2024 Literature Prize

Born in 1970, Han grew up in a financially struggling family – her father, Han Seung-won, was also a writer – and moved often. “It was too much for a small child,” Han said New York TimesAlexandra Alter in 2016. “But I was fine because I was surrounded by books.”

First published in a literary magazine in 1993, Han has been an acclaimed author in South Korea for decades. In 2015, Deborah Smith's English translation of The vegetarian brought Han onto the international stage.

As Ankhi Mukherjee, a literary scholar at Oxford University, tells it Just' Alter and Alex Marshall, she lectured on Han's work “year after year” for almost two decades.

“Her writing is relentlessly political – be it the politics of the body, gender or people fighting against the state – but never lets go of the literary imagination,” says Mukherjee. “It’s never hypocritical; it’s very playful, fun and surreal.”

The Nobel Prize is one of the highest honors in the literary world. Winners will receive a cash prize of about $1 million — as well as an expected boost in advertising and book sales. The literary prize went to the Norwegian playwright and author Jon Fosse in 2023 and to the French author Annie Ernaux in 2022. In the past, critics have pointed out the lack of diversity among the award winners.

As Paige Aniyah Morris, who is working on an upcoming translation of Hans Roman We're not breaking up with e. Yaewon, tells that Washington PostSophia Nguyen: “Korea has been aiming for the Nobel Prize in Literature for decades.”

“I can imagine that this feels like a long time, especially for Korean readers and translators, and also a promise that even more doors will be opened wide for Korean literature in the future,” she adds.

First reactions | Han Kang, Nobel Prize in Literature 2024 | Telephone interview

Han was at home in Seoul with her son when she received the news. As the author said in a telephone interview with Nobel laureate Jenny Rydén, she was both surprised and honored. When asked about her literary inspirations, Han found it difficult to name names.

“For me, since childhood, all writers have been a collective,” she said. “They are looking for meaning in life. Sometimes they are lost, sometimes they are determined, and all their efforts and all their strengths have been my inspiration.”