STOCKHOLM: Renowned South Korean author Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for her intense poetic prose, said the award-giving body on Thursday.
The Swedish Academy awarded the prize which is worth $1.1 million.
“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,” Anders Olsson, chairman of the Academy’s Nobel Committee, in a statement said.
Han Kang is the first South Korean and the 18th woman to win the Nobel Literature Prize. She started her career in 1993 with the publication of a number of poems in the magazine Literature and Society, while she published her short story collection “Love of Yeosu” in 1995.
The South Korean author born in 1970, comes from a literary background, as her father was a well-regarded novelist.
She won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction for her novel “The Vegetarian” in 2016. This was the first of her novels to be translated into English and regarded as her major international work.
Han Kang throughout her writing career, has explored the themes of violence, grief, sexuality and mental health.
South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol has also congratulated Han Kang in a Facebook post: “You have turned the painful scars of our modern history into great pieces of literature.”
