Prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million)
\n STOCKHOLM
\nSouth Korean author Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for \u201cher intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life\u201d, the award-giving body said on Thursday.
\nThe prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).
\n\u201cShe 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,\u201d Anders Olsson, chairman of the academy\u2019s Nobel Committee, said in a statement.
\nHan Kang, the first South Korean to win the literature prize, began her career in 1993 with the publication of a number of poems in the magazine Literature and Society, while her prose debut came in 1995 with the short story collection \u201cLove of Yeosu\u201d.
\nBorn in 1970, she comes from a literary background, her father being a well-regarded novelist.
\nHan Kang won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction for her novel \u201cThe Vegetarian\u201d in 2016, the first of her novels to be translated into English and regarded as her major international breakthrough.
\nIn \u201cThe Vegetarian\u201d, after struggling with gruesome recurring nightmares, Yeong-hye, a dutiful wife, rebels against societal norms, forsaking meat and stirring concern among her family that she is mentally ill.
\nTwo of her books have been made into films; \u201cThe Vegetarian\u201d in 2009, directed by Lim Woo-Seong, and 2011\u2019s \u201cScars\u201d, by the same director.
\nHer 2002 novel \u201cYour Cold Hands\u201d, which bears obvious traces of Han Kang\u2019s interest in art, reproduces a manuscript left behind by a missing sculptor who is obsessed with making plaster casts of female bodies.
\n\u201cThere 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,\u201d the Academy said in an official biography.
\nShe is the second South Korean to win a Nobel prize ever, after 2000 peace prize winner and former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung.
\n\u2018Ordinary day\u2019
\nBookmaker favourites ahead of the announcement included Chinese writer Can Xue and many other perennial possible candidates such as Kenya\u2019s Ngugi Wa Thiong\u2019o, Australia\u2019s Gerald Murnane and Canada\u2019s Anne Carson.
\n\u201cI was able to talk to Han Kang over the phone,\u201d Mats Malm, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy told a press conference. \u201cShe was having an ordinary day, it seems, she had just finished supper with her son,\u201d he said.
\nThe literature prize is the most accessible of the Nobels for many and, as such, the Academy\u2019s choices are met with praise and criticism, often in equal measure.
\nThe Academy\u2019s omission of literary giants such as Russia\u2019s Leo Tolstoy, France\u2019s Emile Zola and Ireland\u2019s James Joyce has left many book-lovers scratching their heads over the last century.
\nThe 2016 prize award to American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was hailed as radical rethink about what literature is, but also seen as a snub to authors in more traditional genres.
\nThe prizes, for achievements in science, literature and peace, were created through a bequest in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel. They have been awarded since 1901, with the final prize in the line-up \u2014 economics \u2014 being a later addition.
\nAfter peace, the literature award tends to garner the most attention, thrusting authors into the global spotlight and yielding a spike in book sales that can, however, be relatively short-lived for authors who are not household names.
\nEven so, the prize money and a place on a list that includes luminaries such as Irish poet WB Yeats, who won in 1923, American novelist Ernest Hemingway, who took the award in 1954, and Colombia\u2019s Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner in 1982, is an appealing proposition.
\nNorwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse won in 2023.
\nThe fourth award to be handed out every year, the literature prize follows those for medicine, physics and chemistry announced earlier this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million) STOCKHOLM South Korean author Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for \u201cher intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life\u201d, the award-giving body said on Thursday. The prize is awarded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":436557,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-436536","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n