South Korea's Han Kang wins 2024 Nobel literature prize

STOCKHOLM — 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 on Thursday.

The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).

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 W.B. 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.

© Thomson Reuters 2024.