South Korean author Han Kang is the 2024 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy announced on Thursday.
She received the world’s most prestigious literary award for her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,” Permanent Secretary of the Nobel Academy Mats Malm said during the award announcement in Stockholm’s Old Town.
Han is the 18th woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature — and the first woman among the Nobel laureates announced this year.
She is the first Korean to win the literature prize. The 53-year-old was born in Gwangju, South Korea, and lives in Seoul.
She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 for her novel “The Vegetarian,” about a woman who decides to stop eating meat and the personal ramifications this has on her life.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is worth 11 million Swedish krona ($1.06 million).
German literary critic Denis Scheck considers the selection of Han for the prize to be an excellent choice. “The academy has shown a felicitous touch,” Scheck told dpa shortly after the announcement. Han, he said, is a truly Nobel-worthy author who has written wonderful stories. Scheck said the selection of the author was a surprise – “but a pleasant one.”
Last year’s winner of one of literature’s highest honours was Norwegian novelist and playwright Jon Fosse. In 2022, the French author Annie Ernaux won for her body of largely autobiographical work.
Since the first award in 1901, a total of 121 Nobel laureates in literature have been named.
Among them have been world-renowned authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as figures like the former British prime minister Winston Churchill and the US musician Bob Dylan.
Earlier this week, the winners of the Nobel prizes in the scientific categories of medicine, physics, and chemistry were announced, all seven of them men.
After Thursday’s announcement in literature, the Nobel Prize proceedings now temporarily move from Stockholm to Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.
To conclude this year’s prizes, the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, donated by the Swedish central bank, is due to be announced on Monday, again in Stockholm.
The prestigious Nobel medals are due to be ceremoniously awarded on December 10, the anniversary of the death of the prize’s founder and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel (1833-96).
Each award category is endowed with prize money of 11 million kronor this year.
