The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded to 53-year-old South Korean novelist Han Kang for her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. Her works include The Vegetarian, The White Book, Human Acts and Greek Lessons.
“I was able to talk to Han Kang on the phone,” said Swedish Academy permanent secretary Mats Malm after announcing the winner. “She was having an ordinary day it seemed – had just finished supper with her son. She wasn’t really prepared for this, but we have begun to discuss preparations for December” – when Han will be presented with the Nobel prize.
Han’s novels, novellas, essays and short story collections have variously explored themes of patriarchy, violence, grief and humanity. Her 2007 novel The Vegetarian, which was translated into English in 2015 by Deborah Smith, won the International Booker prize in 2016.
Han is the first South Korean author and 18th woman to win the prize. Her “empathy for vulnerable, often female, lives is palpable, and reinforced by her metaphorically charged prose,” said Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee. She “has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in a poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose”.
Han was born in Gwangju, a city in the south-west of South Korea, in 1970. When she was 10, her family moved to the Suyu-dong neighbourhood of Seoul. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University in the capital.
In 1993, Han made her literary debut with a series of five poems published in the Korean magazine Literature and Society. The following year, she won the Seoul Shinmun spring literary contest with a story, Red Anchor.
Her first short story collection, Love of Yeosu, arrived in 1995. In 1998, she participated in the University of Iowa International Writing Program for three months, supported by Arts Council Korea.
The Vegetarian was her first novel to be translated into English. Though the translation was criticised, it helped earn Han worldwide readership.
Han’s latest novel, We Do Not Part, will be published in English in 2025, translated by E Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. The story follows a writer discovering the impact of the 1948-49 Jeju uprising on the family of her friend. The French translation of the novel won the prix Médicis Étranger in 2023.