South Korean author Han Kang wins 2024 Nobel Prize in literature

South Korean author Han Kang has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. She is the first Korean writer and the eighteenth woman to win the award. In 2016, she won the International Booker Prize for her novel The Vegetarian. She was the first Korean writer to win that award as well.

The new laureate is the 121st winner of what’s widely seen as the most prestigious award in world literature. Founded by Swedish inventor and industrialist Alfred Nobel, the award is intended for an author who has “produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” Nobel prizes have been awarded since 1901.

The writer, who is 53 years old, has established a readership far beyond her home country, wrote critic Leland Cheuk in a recent NPR review of her novel Greek Lessons.

“Kang has carved out an international reputation for doing unsettling, transgressive work that’s as unpredictable as it is confrontational,” he wrote. But this novel, about a woman who’s lost the ability to speak, and signs up to study ancient Greek with an instructor slowly losing his sight, contains “a hopeful, and humane belief in the redemptive power of love.”

“The reading experience is like that of watching a quiet indie film that tugs little by little at your heartstrings until you’re rendered speechless with both sadness and hope by the final pages,” he wrote.

In its citation, the Swedish Academy commended Han Kang “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

“In her oeuvre,” the Academy wrote, “Han Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. 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.”

In a 2016 NPR interview, Kang spoke to the intensity and darkness in many of her
books. “I always feel I am questioning when I write novels, and I wanted to deal with my long-lasting question about human violence and the possibility or impossibility of refusing it,” she said. “And I will be happy if the readers could share my questions.”

Han Kang joins the ranks of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez and Bob Dylan (a controversial pick who won in 2016.)

For the past few decades, the Nobel literature category has been dominated by white authors. Between 2000 and 2023, only seven people of color have won. That’s a significant change from the Nobel literature awards of the 1980s and early 1990s, when authors of color from Egypt, Nigeria, Mexico, Japan, Saint Lucia and the U.S. all won within the same decade.

Chinese writer Can Xue was predicted by bookies to have the best odds of winning this year, with the British betting company Ladbrokes giving her 6/1 odds as of Wednesday afternoon, due to the prominence of such books as The Last Lover. Her novel Love in the New Millennium and story collection I Live in the Slums were both longlisted for the International Booker Prize. (Ladbrokes gave the next-best odds to Australian novelist Gerald Murnane, Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, Greek writer Ersi Sotiropoulos and Argentinian writer César Aira.)