Today, the Swedish Academy awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature to Han Kang, “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
Han Kang was born in 1970 in South Korea. In 1993 she made her literary debut as a poet, and was first published as novelist in 1994. In 2016, she broke out into the English-speaking literary world with Deborah Smith’s translation of The Vegetarian, originally published in 2007, which Daniel Hahn called “a bracing, visceral, system-shocking addition to the Anglophone reader’s diet,” and which won the International Man Booker Prize. (It also made Lit Hub’s list of the best debut novels of the decade.)
Kang, according to the Academy, “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.”
(Did you bet correctly? Someone out there must have…)
Read an excerpt from Kang’s most widely-read book in English, The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith, here.
Read Han Kang on violence, beauty, and the (im)possibility of innocence, in conversation with Bethanne Patrick, here.
Ill. Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach