Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to South Korean author Han Kang

The 53-year-old author was rewarded “for her intense poetic prose which confronts historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life,” explained the jury in a press release.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded on Thursday October 10 to South Korean author Han Kang, who writes poems and novels in Korean. This 53-year-old woman is rewarded “for his intense poetic prose which confronts historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life”, specifies the committee on X.

Han Kang’s work “is characterized by this double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental and physical torments in close connection with Eastern thought”he adds on the same network.

She gave South Korea its first Nobel Prize in literature. Han Kang is also the first Asian woman to win the prestigious award and the second South Korean Nobel Prize winner after former President Kim Dae-jung, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2000, notes the news agency. South Korean Yonhap.

Han Kang was born on November 27, 1970 in Gwangju city. She then moved to Seoul, the South Korean capital, at the age of 9 with her family, the committee said. “She comes from a literary background, her father being a renowned novelist.” Besides writing, “she also devoted herself to art and music, which is reflected in all her literary production.”

The novelist began writing in 1993 by publishing poems. She moved on to prose, two years later, with a collection of short stories. It is with The Vegetarianpublished in 2007 and translated into English in 2015, which she became known on the international scene. The novel won the International Booker Prize in 2016. In three parts, it depicts the violent repercussions that her decision to no longer submit to the heroine of the story will have on her. food standards. The book was adapted into a film in 2009.

In 2023, Han Kang won the Foreign Medici Prize for his novel Impossible goodbyestranslated by Kyungran Choi and Pierre Bisiou. An award shared with Lidia Jorge, author of Misericordia. The novel, published in 2021 in its country, was published in August 2023 by Grasset editions. He returns to the massacre suffered by civilians on the Korean island of Jeju in 1948.

“In his work, Han Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible rules and, in each of his works, exposes the fragility of human life”underlines Anders Olsson, president of the Nobel Committee. “She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and, through her poetic and experimental style, she has become an innovator in the field of contemporary prose.”