• The Nobel Prize in Literature 2024 is awarded to the South Korean author Han Kang for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.

• In each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life, the Nobel committee said. 

• 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.

• Han Kang was born on November 27, 1970 in the South Korean city of Gwangju. She comes from a literary background, her father being a reputed novelist. Alongside her writing, she has also devoted herself to art and music, which is reflected throughout her entire literary production.

Han Kang’s major works

• Han Kang began her career in 1993 with the publication of a number of poems in the magazine ‘Literature and Society’. Her prose debut came in 1995 with the short story collection ‘Love of Yeosu’, followed soon afterwards by several other prose works, both novels and short stories. 

Notable among these is the novel ‘Your Cold Hands’ (2002), which bears obvious traces of Han Kang’s interest in art.

• Han Kang’s major international breakthrough came with the novel ‘The Vegetarian’ (2007). Written in three parts, the book portrays the violent consequences that ensue when its protagonist Yeong-hye refuses to submit to the norms of food intake. Her decision not to eat meat is met with various, entirely different reactions. 

• A more plot-based book is ‘The Wind Blows, Go’ (2010), a large and complex novel about friendship and artistry, in which grief and a longing for transformation are strongly present.

• ‘Greek Lessons’ (2011) is a captivating portrayal of an extraordinary relationship between two vulnerable individuals. A young woman who, following a string of traumatic experiences, has lost the power of speech connects with her teacher in Ancient Greek, who is himself losing his sight. From their respective flaws, a brittle love affair develops. The book is a beautiful meditation around loss, intimacy and the ultimate conditions of language.

• In the novel ‘Human Acts’ (2014), Han Kang narrates a historical event that took place in the city of Gwangju, where she herself grew up and where hundreds of students and unarmed civilians were murdered during a massacre carried out by the South Korean military in 1980.

• The ‘White Book’ (2016) is an elegy dedicated to the person who could have been the narrative self’s elder sister, but who passed away only a couple of hours after birth. In a sequence of short notes, all concerning white objects, it is through this colour of grief that the work as a whole is associatively constructed. 

• In ‘We Do Not Part’ (2021), the story unfolds in the shadow of a massacre that took place in the late 1940s on South Korea’s Jeju Island, where tens of thousands of people, among them children and the elderly, were shot on suspicion of being collaborators.

• Han Kang’s work is characterised by this double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental and physical torment with close connections to Eastern thinking.

• Her novel ‘The Vegetarian’ and novella ‘Baby Buddha’ were adapted to movies.

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