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| Han Kang | |
South Korean writer Han Kang has won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature, announced this morning by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Kang was cited for "her intense poetic prose" that "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." She is the first Korean to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. She receives 11 million Swedish kronor (just over $1 million).
Kang is best known in the English-speaking world for The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith (Hogarth), which won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction in 2016 and was made into a movie. (See our review here.) The Swedish Academy commented: "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. Her decision not to eat meat is met with various, entirely different reactions. Her behaviour is forcibly rejected by both her husband and her authoritarian father, and she is exploited erotically and aesthetically by her brother-in-law, a video artist who becomes obsessed with her passive body. Ultimately, she is committed to a psychiatric clinic, where her sister attempts to rescue her and bring her back to a 'normal' life. However, Yeong-hye sinks ever deeper into a psychosis-like condition expressed through the 'flaming trees,' a symbol for a plant kingdom that is as enticing as it is dangerous."
Her other titles published in English include The White Book, translated by Deborah Smith (Hogarth), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2018; Human Acts: A Novel, translated by Deborah Smith (Hogarth) (see our review here); Greek Lessons, translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won (Hogarth) (see our review here); and We Do Not Part: A Novel, translated by Emily Yae Won and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth). Mongolian Mark won the Yi Sang Literary Prize in 2005, and her novella Baby Buddha won the Korean Literature Novel Award in 1999 and was made into a film. She has published other novels, novellas, and poetry in Korean.
Kang's first published works were poems that appeared in 1993. The following year, her first short story appeared. Her other honors include the Today's Young Artist Award and the Manhae Prize for Literature. She has taught creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.