South Korean writer Han Kang, whose international breakthrough novel The Vegetarian was 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.”
Han’s 2007 novel The Vegetarian, her first novel to be translated into English, won the International Booker Prize in 2015. The story of Yeong-hye, a part-time graphic artist and homemaker, whose decision to stop eating meat leads to mental health struggles and problems in her familial life, was adapted as a feature film by Woo-Seong Lim and screened at Sundance in 2010.
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.
Han Kang is the first South Korean to win the literature Nobel.
Chinese author Can Xue, Canada’s Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale), Japanese writer Haruki Murakami (Burning, Drive My Car), India-born British-American novelist Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children), who was stabbed in 2022 before giving a lecture in New York, and American Don DeLillo (White Noise) 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 Nobel Prize for 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 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.
Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan won the honor in 2016.
