STOCKHOLM: South Korean writer Han Kang has gained the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for “her intense poetic prose that addresses historic trauma and exposes the fragility of human life”, the awarding physique mentioned on Thursday (October 10).
The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is value 11 million SEK ($1.1 million).
“She has a singular consciousness of the connections between physique and soul, between the dwelling and the useless, and together with her poetic and experimental model she has turn out to be an innovator in modern prose,” Anders Olsson, president of the Nobel Committee, mentioned in a press release. ‘Academy. .
Han Kang, the primary South Korean to win the literary prize, started her profession in 1993 with the publication of some poems within the journal Literature and Society, whereas her prose debut occurred in 1995 with the gathering of quick tales Love of Yeosu.
Born in 1970, she comes from a literary background, her father is an esteemed novelist.
Han Kang gained the Man Booker International Prize for fiction for his novel “The Vegetarian” in 2016, the primary of his novels to be translated into English and regarded his main worldwide breakthrough.
In “The Vegetarian,” after combating recurring grotesque nightmares, Yeong-hye, a dutiful spouse, rebels towards social norms, abandoning meat and elevating issues in her household that she is mentally sick.
Two of his books have been made into movies: “The Vegetarian” in 2009, directed by Lim Woo-seong, and “Scars” in 2011, by the identical director.
His 2002 novel “Your Cold Hands”, which bears clear traces of Han Kang’s curiosity in artwork, reproduces a manuscript left by a lacking sculptor who’s obsessive about making plaster casts of feminine our bodies.
“There is a priority with human anatomy and the interaction between particular person and expertise, the place within the sculptor’s work a battle arises between what the physique reveals and what it hides,” the Academy mentioned in an official biography.
She is the second South Korean to win a Nobel Prize ever, after 2000 Peace Prize winner and former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung.
“ORDINARY DAY”
Bookmakers’ favorites earlier than the announcement included Chinese author Can Xue and a number of other different doable candidates corresponding to Ngugi Wa Thiong’o of Kenya, Gerald Murnane of Australia and Anne Carson of Canada.
“I used to be in a position to speak to Han Kang on the cellphone,” Mats Malm, everlasting secretary of the Swedish Academy, mentioned at a information convention.
“He appeared like he had a standard day, he had simply completed dinner along with his son,” she mentioned.
The literature prize is for a lot of probably the most accessible of the Nobels and, as such, the Academy’s selections obtain reward and criticism, typically in equal measure.
The Academy’s omission of literary giants corresponding to Russian Leo Tolstoy, Frenchman Emile Zola and Irishman James Joyce has left many e book lovers scratching their heads over the past century.
The 2016 prize awarded to American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was hailed as a radical rethink on what literature is, but additionally seen as an affront to authors of extra conventional genres.
The awards, for achievement in science, literature and peace, have been created via a bequest from Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel. They have been awarded since 1901, whereas the ultimate prize, the financial one, was added later.
After peace, the literary prize tends to garner probably the most consideration, bringing authors into the worldwide highlight and producing a spike in e book gross sales that may, nevertheless, be comparatively short-lived for authors who aren’t family names.
Even so, the prize cash and a spot on an inventory that features luminaries such because the Irish poet WB Yeats, who gained in 1923, the American novelist Ernest Hemingway, who gained the prize in 1954, and the Colombian Gabriel Garcia Márquez, winner in 1982, is a sexy proposition.
Norwegian writer and playwright Jon Fosse gained in 2023.
The fourth prize awarded annually, the literature prize follows these for medication, physics and chemistry introduced earlier this week.
