Books by the South Korean writer Han Kang were displayed at the Swedish Academy after the announcement that she was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, Sweden, on Thursday. Photo by Jessica Gow/EPA-EFE
The Nobel Committee announced on Thursday that South Korean author Han Kang was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The committee said Kang was honored “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” Advertisement
Kang, the daughter of a novelist, had her international breakthrough in 2007 with her novel The Vegetarian, written in three parts.
“The book portrays the violent consequences that ensue when its protagonist Yeong-hye refuses to submit to the norms of food intake,” the Nobel Committee said in a statement. “Her decision not to eat meat is met with various, entirely different reactions. Her behavior is forcibly rejected by both her husband and authoritative father and she is exploited erotically and aesthetically by her brother-in-law, a video artist who becomes obsessed with her passive body.”
The Vegetarian was adapted into a film in 2009 as was her other novel Scars in 2011, both directed by Lim-Woo Seong.
Kang also devoted much of her time to art and music as well as writing. The Nobel committee said those endeavors are reflected in her literary work. Her writing career started with the collection of poems being published 1993 in a South Korean magazine. Advertisement
In 1995, she published her first short story collection, the Love of Yoeosu, followed by her first novel.
Her 2002 novel Your Cold Hands, delves into her interest in art, which reproduces a manuscript left behind by a missing sculptor who was obsessed with making plaster casts of the female body.
“She has a unique awareness of the connection between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose,” said Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel Committee, in a statement.
