Nobel Prize in Literature 2024 goes to South Korean author Han Kang

South Korean author Han Kang has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2024.

After three days of Nobel prizes honouring work in the sciences, the Nobel Prize 2024 in literature was announced on Thursday (October 10, 2024) by the Nobel Committee at the Swedish Academy. She is the first South Korean writer to win the coveted award.

The Nobel Prize 2024: an interactive guide

The Nobel Prize in Literature 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,” the Academy said.

Han Kang was born in 1970 in the South Korean city of Gwangju before, at the age of nine, moving with her family to Seoul. 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, the Academy’s media statement said.

She began her career in 1993 with the publication of a number of poems in the South Korean magazine Literature and Society. Her prose debut came in 1995 with the short story collection ‘Love of Yeosu’.

Her major international breakthrough came with the novel ‘The Vegetarian’. The three-part novel 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.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2023 was awarded to Norwegian author Jon Fosse “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable”. While in 2022, the Literature Nobel was awarded to French author Annie Ernaux “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she exposes the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.

This year the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for decoding protein design and structures.

Nobel announcements opened on Monday (October 7, 2024) with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of machine learning — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the physics prize on Tuesday ( October 8, 2024).

The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday (October 11, 2024) and the economics award on October 14.

The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($ 1 million) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to accept their awards at ceremonies on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

(with inputs from AP)

Published – October 10, 2024 04:32 pm IST