Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to South Korean author Han Kang for her 'intense poetic prose'

Han Kang is a distinguished author in South Korea who has previously won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for "The Vegetarian". She comes from a literary background as her father was also a reputed novelist and began her career in 1993 with a short story collection.

Stockholm: The Nobel Prize 2024 in Literature was awarded to South Korean author Han Kang for her "intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life", the Nobel Committee announced on Thursday. Kang comes from a literary background as 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 was born in 1970 in the South Korean city of Gwangju before, at the age of nine, moving with her family to Seoul. She 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 followed soon afterwards by several other prose works, both novels and short stories. The 53-year-old author 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.

Kang is the first South Korean to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. "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," Anders Olsson, chairman of the academy's Nobel Committee, said in a statement.

Bookmaker favourites ahead of the announcement included Chinese writer Can Xue and many other perennial possible candidates such as Kenya's Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Australia's Gerald Murnane and Canada's Anne Carson. The literature prize is the most accessible of the Nobels for many and, as such, the Academy's choices are met with praise and criticism, often in equal measure.

Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse won in 2023. The Academy's omission of literary giants such as Russia's Leo Tolstoy, France's Emile Zola and Ireland's James Joyce has left many book-lovers scratching their heads over the last century. The 2016 prize award to American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was hailed as a radical rethink about what literature is, but also seen as a snub to authors in more traditional genres.

The announcements for Nobel Prize 2024 opened on Monday with Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of machine learning — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the physics prize. The Nobel Prize 2024 in Chemistry was awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John M Jumper for the use of artificial intelligence to predict the structure of proteins. 

The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on October 14. The prizes, for achievements in science, literature and peace, were created through a bequest in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel. They have been awarded since 1901, with the final prize in the line-up - economics - being a later addition.

(with inputs from agencies)

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