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The South Korean author Han Kang, recognized for her exact and haunting tales, is the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for literature.
The 53-year-old was recognised for her “intense, poetic prose that confronts historic traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”, the Nobel committee stated on Thursday.
Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel literature committee, highlighted Han’s “distinctive consciousness of the connections between physique and soul, the residing and the lifeless, and in her poetic and experimental model has develop into an innovator in up to date prose”.
Han, who has received quite a few Korean and worldwide awards for her work, is the primary Asian girl and South Korean author to win the Nobel literature prize. Her award, which comes with prize cash of SKr11mn ($1mn), comes towards a backdrop of rising worldwide appreciation of South Korean music, movie and literature.
Han’s novels embody The Vegetarian, which received the 2016 Man Worldwide Booker Prize. The guide tells the story of a girl whose violent desires spur her to flout household and custom and quit consuming meat, assuming as a substitute a “plantlike” existence. The Monetary Instances described it as “quick, quirky and memorable”.
Critics have praised the intensive stylistic number of Han’s fiction and her metaphorically charged prose. Anna-Karin Palm, a member of the Nobel literature committee, stated Han writes “intense lyrical prose that’s each tender and brutal, and generally barely surrealistic as nicely”.
Recurring themes embody the ability of previous occasions over the current. Her works are sometimes inhabited and haunted by each residing and lifeless characters, bringing many dimensions to the story. Topics vary from unflinching reckonings with the political violence that has scarred South Korean historical past to private trauma.
In Human Acts, revealed in English in 2016 and praised by Olsson as “witness literature”, Han returned to her southwestern residence metropolis of Gwangju, which her household left simply months earlier than the 1980 protests towards Seoul’s army regime have been crushed, leaving lots of lifeless.
Her newest novel, which can be revealed in English subsequent 12 months as We Do Not Half, offers with the bloodbath of alleged communist collaborators on a distant island as advised via long-suppressed household tales.
In an interview with the FT following her Man Booker Worldwide award, Han, whose father and brother are each writers, stated: “I all the time really feel fascinated by subtlety and delicacy of language, so I’ve this nice debt to Korean literature. However after I write my novels, I all the time have a way of universality.”
Mats Malm, everlasting secretary of the Swedish Academy, stated Han was stunned when he phoned to inform her the information of the award. “She was having an extraordinary day, it appears; she had simply completed supper together with her son,” he stated.
The literature prize is the third of the Swedish Academy’s six annual Nobels which can be being introduced on successive weekdays. The winners of the peace and economics prizes comply with on Friday and Monday.
Frederick Studemann is the FT’s literary editor