South Korea's Han Kang wins Nobel literature prize

South Korean author Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for "her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life," the award-giving body said.

The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns (€1m).

"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.

Han Kang, the first South Korean to win the literature prize, began her career in 1993 with the publication of a number of poems in the magazine Literature and Society, while her prose debut came in 1995 with the short story collection 'Love of Yeosu'.

Her major international breakthrough came with the novel 'The Vegetarian'.

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.

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 radical rethink about what literature is, but also seen as a snub to authors in more traditional genres.

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.

After peace, the literature award tends to garner the most attention, thrusting authors into the global spotlight and yielding a spike in book sales that can, however, be relatively short-lived for authors who are not household names.

Even so, the prize money and a place on a list that includes luminaries such as Irish poet WB Yeats, who won in 1923, American novelist Ernest Hemingway, who took the award in 1954, and Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner in 1982, is an appealing proposition.

Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse won in 2023.

The fourth award to be handed out every year, the literature prize follows those for medicine, physics and chemistry announced earlier this week.

So what do we know about the prize?

The Nobel Prize committee has awarded a winner in literature since 1901 and it has been awarded 116 times to 120 individuals. It has also been male-dominated, with 103 men and just 17 women previously taking the prize.

Ms Kang is the 18th woman to win it.

Previous Winners

Previous names of winners that people would recognise, include Bob Dylan, Toni Morrison and closer to home there have been four Irish winners including George Bernard Shaw, WB Yeats, Samuel Beckett, and most recently Seamus Heaney 1995.

Last year, Jon Fosse won and he was a bit of a surprise win, as his work rarely appears in translation beyond his large Norwegian audiences. In his case, the Nobel committee commended the writer’s extensive bibliography, and they observed that he gave a "voice to the unsayable."

And there have been other surprise winners too.

In 2017, no one was expecting the widely read English-Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro to take home the prize. The year before, even fewer saw Bob Dylan coming - and he won for, as the committee described it "having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition".

Dylan famously stayed silent for days after the announcement, and ultimately his Nobel lecture was posted on its website as he chose not to deliver the lecture in person . He also chose not to travel to pick up his prize.

Predictions for this year

The literature prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers of style-heavy, story-light prose so predictions vary wildly as commentators built up anticipation for their chosen nominees.

Chinese author Can Xue was once again the frontrunner with the bookies to win the 2024 prize.

Can, 71, was the top prediction to win last year’s prize, however, she was pipped by Fosse.

Another name to show up in last year’s predictions was Gerard Murnane. The Australian writer is often considered the "greatest living English-language writer" and is regularly tipped.

Who selects winner?

The Swedish academy is responsible for selection and it has 18 members – and the Nobel committee for literature comprises four to five members. It is the working body that evaluates the nominations and presents its recommendation to the Swedish academy.

A longlist of 15-20 writers is presented and then a shortlist of five is selected.

Theoretically anyone could be nominated - anyone who writes excellent, outstanding literature - no other demand, just the quality of the work.

But the nominations are a closely guarded secret. Those names are not made public for 50 years after they have been nominated!

Four groups are allowed to nominate; Swedish academy members, professors of literature, previous Nobel Prize laureates, and chairpersons of writing organisations.

Additional reporting Evelyn O'Rourke