Han Kang is the first South Korean writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature: NPR

South Korean author Han Kang in Seoul, South Korea, in 2016. Kang won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Lee Jin-man/AP

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Lee Jin-man/AP

South Korean author Han Kang has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. She is the first Korean writer and the eighteenth woman to win the award. In 2016 she won the International Booker Prize for her novel The vegetarian. She was also the first Korean author to win this award.

The new laureate is the 121st winner of what is widely considered the most prestigious award in world literature. Established by Swedish inventor and industrialist Alfred Nobel, the prize is intended for an author who has “created the most outstanding work in an ideal direction in the field of literature.” Nobel Prizes have been awarded since 1901.

The 53-year-old author has built a readership far beyond her home country, wrote critic Leland Cheuk in a recent NPR review of her novel Greek lessons.

“Kang has earned an international reputation for his unsettling, transgressive work that is as unpredictable as it is confrontational,” he wrote. But this novel, about a woman who can no longer speak and signs up to study ancient Greek while a lecturer slowly loses his sight, contains “a hopeful and humane faith in the redemptive power of love.”

“The reading experience is like watching a quiet indie film that gradually tugs at your heartstrings until the final pages leave you speechless with sadness and hope,” he wrote.

In its tribute, the Swedish Academy praised Han Kang “for her intense poetic prose that deals with historical trauma and reveals the fragility of human life.”

“In her work,” wrote the academy, “Han Kang confronts historical trauma and invisible rules and exposes the fragility of human life in each of her works.” She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead and has become an innovator of contemporary prose with her poetic and experimental style.”

In a 2016 NPR interview, Kang spoke about the intensity and darkness in much of her
Books. “I always feel like I'm asking questions when I write novels, and I wanted to explore my long-standing question about human violence and the possibility or impossibility of rejecting it,” she said. “And I would be happy if readers could share my questions.”

Han Kang joins the ranks of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez and Bob Dylan (a controversial 2016 winner).

In recent decades, the Nobel literature category has been dominated by white authors. Between 2000 and 2023, only seven people of color have won. That's a significant change from the Nobel Prizes in Literature of the 1980s and early 1990s, when authors of color from Egypt, Nigeria, Mexico, Japan, St. Lucia and the United States all won in the same decade.

The Chinese author Can The Last Lover. Your novel Love in the new millennium and story collection I live in the slums Both were on the longlist for the International Booker Prize. (Ladbrokes gave the second best odds to Australian writer Gerald Murnane, Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, Greek writer Ersi Sotiropoulos and Argentine writer César Aira.)