The well-known and award-winning South Korean author Han Kang has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, “for her intensely poetic prose that confronts historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life.”

Along with literature, she is also involved in the visual arts and music, which is reflected in the entirety of her literary output.

“Hang Gang’s work is characterized by this double exposure of pain, a correspondence between spiritual and physical torment, in close connection with Eastern thought,” explained the Swedish Academy.

The author, born November 27, 1970 in Gwangju, South Korea, possesses “a unique awareness of the relationships between body and soul, the living and the dead, and, with her poetic and experimental style, is considered a pioneer in the field of contemporary prose,” Nobel committee chairman Anders Olsson told reporters.

In 2016, Han won the Man Booker International Prize for her English translation of “The Vegetarian” (2007), a novel in which a woman’s decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences.

He has also published the short story collections The Fruits of My Wife (2000) and The Fire Salamander (2012) and the novels:

  • Black Stag (1998),
  • Your Cold Hands (2002),
  • Wind Blows, Go (2010),
  • Greek Lesson (2011),
  • Human Deeds (2014),
  • The White Paper (2016) and
  • I don’t forget (2021).

The writer lives in Seoul and is a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the Seoul Arts Institute.

The only other South Korean to receive a Nobel Prize was the country’s former president (1998-2003) Kim Dae-jung, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 for “his work on peace and reconciliation with North Korea.”

Last year, the Norwegian dramatist Jon Fosse was honored with the prestigious literary award.

The Nobel Prize comes with a cash prize of 11 million Swedish kroner ($1.1 million).