South Korean author Han Kang wins Nobel Prize in Literature

After three days of Nobel prizes honouring work in the sciences, the Literature award has been announced by the Nobel Committee at the Swedish Academy.

South Korean author Han Kang has won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

According to the Academy, her oeuvre “confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. 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.”

Kang is the daughter of the novelist Hang Seung-won and previously won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction in 2016 for “The Vegetarian”, a novel about a woman’s descent into mental illness and neglect from her family. It was the first of her books to be published in English.

Other notable releases include 2011’s “Greek lessons”, 2016’s “The White Book” and 2021’s “We Do Not Part.”

The author becomes only the 18th woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

She succeeds Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, who received the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, with Anders Olsson, Chairman of the Nobel Committee, stating that Fosse “combines strong local ties, both linguistic and geographic, with modernist artistic techniques.” 

The Literature prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers of style-heavy, story-light prose. It has also been male-dominated, with just now 18 women among its 119 laureates.

The last woman to win was France’s Annie Ernaux in 2022.

Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the Medicine prize. Two founding fathers of machine learning — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the Physics prize on Tuesday. Yesterday, three scientists who discovered powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor (€967,000) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on 10 December, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the Economics award on 14 October.