South Korean author Han Kang wins Nobel literature prize

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The South Korean writer Han Kang, known for her precise and haunting stories, is the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for literature.

The 53-year-old was recognised for her “intense, poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”, the Nobel committee said on Thursday.

Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel literature committee, highlighted Han’s “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”.

Han, who has won numerous Korean and international awards for her work, is the first Asian woman and South Korean writer to win the Nobel literature prize. Her award, which comes with prize money of SKr11mn ($1mn), comes against a backdrop of growing international appreciation of South Korean music, film and literature.

Han’s novels include The Vegetarian, which won the 2016 Man International Booker Prize. The book tells the story of a woman whose violent dreams spur her to flout family and tradition and give up eating meat, assuming instead a “plantlike” existence. The Financial Times described it as “short, quirky and memorable”.

Critics have praised the extensive stylistic variety of Han’s fiction and her metaphorically charged prose. Anna-Karin Palm, a member of the Nobel literature committee, said Han writes “intense lyrical prose that is both tender and brutal, and sometimes slightly surrealistic as well”.

Recurring themes include the power of past events over the present. Her works are often inhabited and haunted by both living and dead characters, bringing many dimensions to the story. Subjects range from unflinching reckonings with the political violence that has scarred South Korean history to personal trauma.

In Human Acts, published in English in 2016 and praised by Olsson as “witness literature”, Han returned to her southwestern home city of Gwangju, which her family left just months before the 1980 protests against Seoul’s military regime were crushed, leaving hundreds dead.

Her latest novel, which will be published in English next year as We Do Not Part, deals with the massacre of alleged communist collaborators on a remote island as told through long-suppressed family stories.

In an interview with the FT following her Man Booker International award, Han, whose father and brother are both writers, said: “I always feel fascinated by subtlety and delicacy of language, so I have this great debt to Korean literature. But when I write my novels, I always have a sense of universality.”

Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said Han was surprised when he phoned to tell her the news of the award. “She was having an ordinary day, it seems; she had just finished supper with her son,” he said.

The literature prize is the third of the Swedish Academy’s six annual Nobels that are being announced on successive weekdays. The winners of the peace and economics prizes follow on Friday and Monday.

Frederick Studemann is the FT’s literary editor