South Korean author Han Kang won this year’s 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 yesterday.
The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish kronor (US$1.06 million).
“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.
Photo: AFP
Han, 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.
Born in 1970, she comes from a literary background, her father being a well-regarded novelist.
Han won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction for her novel The Vegetarian in 2016, the first of her novels to be translated into English and regarded as her major international breakthrough.
In The Vegetarian, after struggling with gruesome recurring nightmares, Yeong-hye, a dutiful wife, rebels against societal norms, forsaking meat and stirring concern among her family that she is mentally ill.
Two of her books have been made into films: The Vegetarian in 2009, directed by Lim Woo-seong, and 2011’s Scars, by the same director.
Her 2002 novel Your Cold Hands, which bears obvious traces of Han’s interest in art, reproduces a manuscript left behind by a missing sculptor who is obsessed with making plaster casts of female bodies.
“There is a preoccupation with the human anatomy and the play between persona and experience, where a conflict arises in the work of the sculptor between what the body reveals and what it conceals,” the academy said in an official biography.
She is the second South Korean to win a Nobel prize ever, after 2000 peace prize winner and former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung.
Bookmaker favorites ahead of the announcement included Chinese writer Can Xue (殘雪) and many other perennial possible candidates such as Kenya’s Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Australia’s Gerald Murnane.
“I was able to talk to Han Kang over the phone,” Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, told a news conference. “She was having an ordinary day, it seems, she had just finished supper with her son.”
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