STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN -- The Nobel Prize in literature was awarded Thursday to South Korean author Han Kang for what the Nobel committee called âher intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.â
Nobel committee chairman Anders Olsson praised Hanâs âphysical empathy for the vulnerable, often female livesâ of her characters.
He said her work âconfronts 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.â
Han becomes the first South Korean writer to win the Nobel literature prize. She also becomes the second South Korean national to win a Nobel Prize, after late former President Kim Dae-jung won the peace prize in 2000. He was honored for his efforts to restore democracy in South Korea during the countryâs previous military rule and improve relations with war-divided rival North Korea.
Nobel literature committee member Anna-Karin Palm said Han writes âintense lyrical prose that is both tender and brutal, and sometimes slightly surrealistic as well.â
Han, 53, won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for âThe Vegetarian,â an unsettling novel in which a womanâs decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences.
At the time of winning that award, Han said writing novels âis a way of questioning for me.â
âI 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,â she said.
With âThe Vegetarian,â she said, âI wanted to question about being human and I wanted to describe a woman who desperately didnât want to belong to the human race any longer and desperately wanted to reject being human, (humans) who commit such violence."
Her novel âHuman Actsâ was an International Booker Prize finalist in 2018.
Olsson, the committee chair, called âHuman Actsâ a work of âwitness literature.â It is based on the real-life killing of pro-democracy protesters in Hanâs home city of Gwangju in 1980.
The literature prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers of style-heavy, story-light prose. It has also been male-dominated, with just 17 women among its 119 laureates until this year's award. The last woman to win was Annie Ernaux of France, in 2022.
Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of machine learning â John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton â won the physics prize on Tuesday. On Wednesday, three scientists who discovered powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.
The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor (US$1 million) from a bequest left by the awardâs creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobelâs death.
Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands.