2024 Nobel Prize In Literature Awarded To Han Kang

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to the South Korean author Han Kang “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.

한 강 Han Kang was born in 1970 in the South Korean city of Gwangju before, at the age of nine, moving with her family to Seoul. She comes from a literary background, her father being a reputed novelist. Alongside her writing, she has also devoted herself to art and music, which is reflected throughout her entire literary production.

Han Kang began her career in 1993 with the publication of a number of poems in the magazine 문학과사회 (‘Literature and Society’). Her prose debut came in 1995 with the short story collection 여수의 사랑 (‘Love of Yeosu’), followed soon afterwards by several other prose works, both novels and short stories. Notable among these is the novel 그대의 차가운 손 (2002; ‘Your Cold Hands’), which bears obvious traces of Han Kang’s interest in art. The book 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. “Life is a sheet arching over an abyss, and we live above it like masked acrobats” as a sentence towards the end of the book tellingly asserts.

Han Kang’s major international breakthrough came with the novel 채식주의자 (2007; ‘The Vegetarian’, 2015). 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.

Han Kang’s work is characterised by a double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental and physical torment with close connections to Eastern thinking.

In her oeuvre, Han Kang 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.

Anders Olsson
Chair of the Nobel Committee
The Swedish Academy