Han Kang Becomes the First South Korean Author to Win the Nobel Prize in Literature

The Swedish Academy has awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to Han Kang, the renowned novelist and poet. At the announcement Thursday morning, Nobel committee chairman Anders Olsson cited Han’s “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

Han, 53, is the first writer from South Korea to receive the prestigious award. She is best known for her 2007 Surrealist novel The Vegetarian, the three-part story of a woman who stops eating meat and suffers violent consequences. Following the book’s English translation, Han became the first Korean author to win the International Booker Prize in 2016.

In 2018, Han was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Human Acts. The novel takes place in the years following the 1980 uprising against the South Korean government in the city of Gwangju—Han’s hometown.

“Han Kang uses this historical base in a very special way,” said committee member Anna-Karin Palm in an interview after the announcement. “She lets different characters reflect these events, both then and in the present, and also shows how the living and the dead are always intertwined, and how these kinds of traumas stay in a population for generations.”

"Han Kang writes intense, lyrical prose that is both tender and brutal." Literature prize 2024

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Born in 1970, Han grew up in a family that struggled financially—her father, Han Seung-won, was also a novelist—and moved many times. “It was too much for a little child,” Han told the New York Times’ Alexandra Alter in 2016. “But I was all right, because I was surrounded by books.”

Han was first published in a literary magazine in 1993, and she’s been a celebrated author in South Korea for decades. In 2015, Deborah Smith’s English translation of The Vegetarian propelled Han to the international stage.

As Ankhi Mukherjee, a literary scholar at the University of Oxford, tells the Times’ Alter and Alex Marshall, she lectured on Han’s work “year in, year out” for almost two decades.

“Her writing is relentlessly political—whether it’s the politics of the body, of gender, of people fighting against the state—but it never lets go of the literary imagination,” says Mukherjee. “It’s never sanctimonious; it’s very playful, funny and surreal.”

The Nobel Prize is one of the literary world’s highest honors. Winners receive a cash prize of about $1 million—as well as an expected spike in publicity and book sales. The literary award went to Norwegian dramatist and author Jon Fosse in 2023 and French author Annie Ernaux in 2022. In the past, critics have noted the lack of diversity among winners.

As Paige Aniyah Morris, who is working on an upcoming translation of Han’s novel We Do Not Part with e. Yaewon, tells the Washington Post’s Sophia Nguyen, “Korea has been holding out for a Nobel Prize in Literature for decades.”

“I’d imagine that for Korean readers and translators especially, this feels like a long time coming and also like a promise that more doors will be swinging wide open for Korean literature in the future,” she adds.

First Reactions | Han Kang, Nobel Prize in Literature 2024 | Telephone interview

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Han was at home in Seoul with her son when she received the news. As the author said in a phone interview with Nobel Prize staffer Jenny Rydén, she was both surprised and honored. When asked about her literary inspirations, Han found naming names difficult.

“For me, since when I was a child, all writers have been collective,” she said. “They are searching [for] meanings in life. Sometimes they are lost, and sometimes they are determined, and all their efforts and all their strengths have been my inspiration.”

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.