Stockholm: South Korean author Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday for "her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life," according to the Nobel committee. Han won the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first writer from South Korea to do so.
Nobel committee chairman Anders Olsson praised Han’s “physical empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives” of her characters.
He said her work “confronts historical traumas and in each of her works exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in a poetic and experimental style, has become an innovator in contemporary prose.”
Han, 53, was the 2016 International Booker Prize winner for her unsettling novel "The Vegetarian," which tells the story of a lady who decides to give up meat and suffers terrible consequences. Han claimed that writing novels "is a way of questioning for me" at the time of receiving the honour.
“I just try to complete my questions through the process of my writing and I try to stay in the questions, sometimes painful, sometimes - well - sometimes demanding,” she said.
With “The Vegetarian,” she said, ”I wanted to question about being human and I wanted to describe a woman who desperately didn’t want to belong to the human race any longer and desperately wanted to reject being human, (humans) who commit such violence.”
In 2018, her book "Human Acts" was a finalist for the International Booker Prize. The literature prize has long been criticised for favouring writers of style-heavy, narrative-light prose from North America and Europe. It has also always favoured men; up until this year's prize, there were just 17 women among its 119 laureates. In 2022, Frenchwoman Annie Ernaux became the last female winner.
American winners of the medical award, Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, marked the start of six days of Nobel announcements on Monday. John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, two pioneers of machine learning, were awarded the physics prize on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, three scientists were given the Chemistry Nobel Prize for their groundbreaking discoveries that allowed them to decode and even design novel proteins. The economics prize will be given out on October 14 and the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.
Alfred Nobel, a Swedish inventor, made a bequest that supports the prize, which contains a financial reward of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million). The laureates are invited to the ceremonies on December 10, Nobel's death anniversary, to accept their awards.