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Han Kang's work explores historical traumas and human

fragility

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First South Korean to win Nobel literature prize

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Prize worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million)

By Simon Johnson, Justyna Pawlak

STOCKHOLM, Oct 10 (Reuters) - 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 award-giving body said on

Thursday.

The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11

million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).

"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," Anders Olsson, chairman of the academy's Nobel

Committee, said in a statement.

Han Kang, the first South Korean to win the literature

prize, began her career in 1993 with the publication of a number

of poems in the magazine Literature and Society, while her prose

debut came in 1995 with the short story collection "Love of

Yeosu".

Born in 1970, she comes from a literary background, her

father being a well-regarded novelist.

Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction

for her novel "The Vegetarian" in 2016, the first of her novels

to be translated into English and regarded as her major

international breakthrough.

In "The Vegetarian", after struggling with gruesome

recurring nightmares, Yeong-hye, a dutiful wife, rebels against

societal norms, forsaking meat and stirring concern among her

family 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 bears obvious traces

of Han Kang's interest in art, reproduces a manuscript left

behind by a missing sculptor who is obsessed with making plaster

casts of female bodies.

"There is a preoccupation with the human anatomy and the

play between persona and experience, where a conflict arises in

the work of the sculptor between what the body reveals and what

it conceals," the Academy said in an official biography.

She is the second South Korean to win a Nobel prize ever,

after 2000 peace prize winner and former South Korean President

Kim Dae-jung.

'ORDINARY DAY'

Bookmaker favourites ahead of the announcement included

Chinese writer Can Xue and many other perennial possible

candidates such as Kenya's Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Australia's Gerald

Murnane and Canada's Anne Carson.

"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 prize award to American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan

was hailed as radical rethink about what literature is, but also

seen as a snub to authors in more traditional genres.

The prizes, for achievements in science, literature and peace,

were created through a bequest in the will of Swedish dynamite

inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel. They have been awarded

since 1901, with the final prize in the line-up - economics -

being a later addition.

After peace, the literature award tends to garner the most

attention, thrusting authors into the global spotlight and

yielding a spike in book sales that can, however, be relatively

short-lived for authors who are not household names.

Even so, the prize money and a place on a list that includes

luminaries such as Irish poet W.B. 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.

Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse won in 2023.

The fourth award to be handed out every year, the literature

prize follows those for medicine, physics and chemistry

announced earlier this week.

($1 = 10.3978 Swedish crowns)