Han Kang has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2024 “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. The 57-year-old South Korean author won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize for fiction in 2016 for The Vegetarian.
“Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life,” the judges said. “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.”
Kang becomes only the 18th woman of the 120 literature laureates since 1901. Doris Lessing, the oldest laureate. was 87 when she won in 2007. Rudyard Kipling, who was 41 when he was honoured in 1907, is the youngest.
[ The White Book by Han Kang reviewOpens in new window ]
[ Human Acts by Han Kang reviewOpens in new window ]
[ The Vegetarian by Han Kang reviewOpens in new window ]
The prize, considered the most prestigious literary prize in the world, is worth 11 million Swedish krona (€967,470). The prize is judged by the Swedish Academy, made up of 18 distinguished Swedish writers, linguists, literary scholars and historians. Nominations are invited each year from academics and literary organisations worldwide. A longlist of 15-20 writers and then a shortlist of five is selected. The award ceremony takes place on December 10th in Stockholm.
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Kang was born in 1970 in the South Korean city of Gwangju before, at the age of nine, moving with her family to Seoul. 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.
She made her prose debut in 1995 with the short story collection Love of Yeosu. Her major international breakthrough came with the novel The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith, in 2015. Written in three parts, the book portrays the violent consequences that ensue when its protagonist Yeong-hye refuses to eat meat. Her behaviour is forcibly rejected by both her husband and her authoritarian father, and she is exploited erotically and aesthetically by her brother-in-law, a video artist who becomes obsessed with her passive body. Ultimately, she is committed to a psychiatric clinic, where her sister attempts to rescue her and bring her back to a “normal” life.
In Human Acts (2016), Kang explores a massacre of hundreds of students and unarmed civilians by the military in 1980 in her native Gwangju. In seeking to give voice to the victims of history, the book approaches the genre of witness literature.
The White Book (2017) is a poetic elegy dedicated to the person who could have been the narrative self’s elder sister, but who passed away only a couple of hours after birth.
We Do Not Part (2021) unfolds in the shadow of a massacre in the late 1940s on South Korea’s Jeju Island, where tens of thousands of people, among them children and the elderly, were shot on suspicion of being collaborators. The book portrays the shared mourning process undertaken by the narrator and her friend Inseon, who both, long after the event, bear with them the trauma associated with the disaster that has befallen their relatives. Kang traces the friends’ unyielding attempts to bring to light what has fallen into collective oblivion and transform their trauma into a joint art project, which lends the book its title.
Kang’s work is characterised by a correspondence between mental and physical torment. Greek Lessons (2023) portrays an extraordinary relationship between two vulnerable individuals. A young woman who, following a string of traumatic experiences, has lost the power of speech connects with her teacher in Ancient Greek, who is himself losing his sight. From their respective flaws, a brittle love affair develops. The book is a meditation on loss, intimacy and language.
[ Greek Lessons by Han Kang review: a writer in transitionOpens in new window ]
There have been four Irish winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature: William Butler Yeats in 1923; George Bernard Shaw in 1925; Samuel Beckett in 1969; and Seamus Heaney in 1995.
