Nobel Prize 2024 in Literature awarded to Han Kang: Who is she?

Nobel Prize 2024 in Literature has been awarded to author Han Kang for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life. Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy's Nobel Committee announced the prize in Stockholm.

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.

Who is Han Kang?

She is a South Korean author who won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for “The Vegetarian,” an unsettling novel in which a woman's decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences. The 53-year-old was born in 1970 in the South Korean city of Gwangju. But she moved with her family to Seoul at 9. 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 “Literature and Society”. Her prose debut came in 1995 with the short story collection “Love of Yeosu”, followed soon afterwards by several other prose works, both novels and short stories. Notable among these is the novel 2002; “Your Cold Hands”, which bears obvious traces of Han Kang’s interest in art.