Han Kang receives 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for “intense poetic prose”

CNN
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The 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature goes to Han Kang, a South Korean author, for her “intense poetic prose that grapples with historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life.”

Han, 53, began her career with a poetry group in a South Korean magazine before making her prose debut with a short story collection in 1995.

She later began writing longer prose works, most notably The Vegetarian, one of her first books to be translated into English. The novel, which won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016, depicts a young woman's attempt to live a more “plant-like” life after suffering macabre nightmares about human cruelty.

Han is the first South Korean author to win the literary prize and only the 18th woman among the 117 prizes awarded since 1901.

Much of Han's work raises the question posed by a character in her 2019 novel “Europe,” whose protagonist is plagued by nightmares: “If you were able to live the way you want “What would you do with your life?”

Although many of Han's protagonists are women, her prose works are often told from the perspective of men.

“Before my wife became a vegetarian, I always thought she was completely unremarkable,” begins her novel “The Vegetarian.” “However, if there was no particular attraction, no particular disadvantages and therefore there was no reason for either of us not to get married.”

The Swedish Academy praised Han's work for its “unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead.” Through her “poetic and experimental style,” the academy said, Han “has become an innovator in contemporary prose.”