South Korean writer Han Kang, whose international breakthrough novel The Vegetarian were made into a film, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature 2024.
The Swedish Academy unveiled the honoree Thursday, lauding “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
The Vegetarian tells the story of Yeong-hye, a part-time graphic artist and homemaker in Seoul, whose decision to stop eating meat leads to mental health struggles and problems in her familial life. Baby Buddha
The honor is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, in 1895. The others are prizes in chemistry, physics, and medicine, as well as the Nobel Peace Prize.
According to Reuters, Han Kang is first South Korean to win the big literature prize.
Chinese author Can Xue, Canada’s Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale), Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, India-born British-American novelist Salman Rushdie, who was stabbed in 2022 before giving a lecture in New York, and American Don DeLillo were among the other favorites mentioned to win this year’s literature prize, according to bookmakers.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2023 went to Norwegian author Jon Fosse, while the 2022 honor was awarded to French author Annie Ernaux, whose autobiography Happening was adapted for the screen by director Audrey Diwan as the abortion drama under the same name that earned the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival 2021.
Since 1901, the literature prize has been awarded to an author from any country who has, according to Nobel’s will, written “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” It is presented by the Swedish Academy.
Past winners of the Nobel award in literature include U.S. writers Toni Morrison and Saul Bellow, Britain’s Harold Pinter and William Golding, Ireland’s Samuel Beckett, Canada’s Alice Munro, South Africa’s Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee, Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez, France’s Jean-Paul Sartre, Germany’s Gunter Grass, Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk, and China’s Mo Yan.
In 2016, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan won the honor.
