The author, the first South Korean to receive the award, will celebrate it “in silence”
The South Korean writer Han Kang, who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2024 for “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”, an award she has received remembering the Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren and her work ‘The Lionheart Brothers’, who helped her as a child with her questions about “humans, life and death”.
“When I was a child I loved the book ‘The Lionheart Brothers’. I loved it, but I can’t say that she was the only writer who inspired me in my childhood. It’s true that when I read that book, ‘The Lionheart Brothers’, it helped me with my questions about humans, life and death,” the author said in statements collected by Europa Press to the Royal Swedish Academy.
Thus, she said that she feels very connected to Korean literature, which has served as inspiration for her – although she has not dared to choose just one writer – and she hoped that her recognition would be “good news” for readers of Korean literature, with which she feels “very close.”
“I feel very honored, I really appreciate the support of this award. Since I was a child, I grew up with books in Korean and translated as well. But I can say that I grew up with Korean literature, with which I feel very close. So I hope it is good news for readers of Korean literature and for my writer friends,” she added.
The announcement that she was to be awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize was communicated to Kang while she was having dinner with her son in Seoul (South Korea), where she currently lives, and despite this she had a “very quiet” night in which she did not work and simply devoted herself to reading and walking. “It has been an easy day for me,” she said, before stating that she is “very surprised.”
“After this call I would like to have tea, I don’t drink. I am going to have tea with my son and celebrate in silence,” the recent Nobel Prize winner concluded.
“YOU CAN START READING ME WITH ‘WE DO NOT PART'”
After being asked which book new readers can discover her work with, Kang assured that writers always like her most recent work. “You can start reading me with ‘We do not part’, I hope that can be a start. ‘Human acts’ is directly connected to this book. You can also do it with ‘The white book’, which is very personal to me, because it is quite autobiographical,” he explained.
The Royal Swedish Academy has awarded Kang the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for her “unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and with her poetic and experimental style she has become an innovator of the contemporary era,” said the president of the Nobel Committee, Anders Olsson, on Thursday.
Han Kang was born in Gwangju in 1970 and began her career as a novelist by winning the Seoul Shinmun Spring Literary Contest in 1994. In parallel with her writing activity, she devoted herself to music, painting and even worked as a professor in the Creative Writing department of the Seoul Institute of the Arts until 2018. In 1993 she debuted as a writer with a collection of poems in the magazine ‘Literature and Society’ and later with a series of short prose novels.
However, she rose to fame with the novel ‘The Vegetarian’ (Random House), which she published in 2007, about which, Olsson has pointed out her “physical empathy for the vulnerable, for women”, something that, she explained, is “remarkable, and is reinforced by her prose loaded with metaphors”. It was her first novel translated into English and won the International Booker Prize in 2016.
In this regard, the Royal Swedish Academy has highlighted her novel ‘The Greek Class’ (Random House) for being a “beautiful reflection on loss, intimacy and the conditions of language”, as well as the books – translated into more than thirty languages - ‘The White Book’ or ‘Human Acts’, a political novel where Han Kang tells of a historical event in her hometown that ended with the massacre of hundreds of students and civilians in 1980.
This last work earned her the Manhae Prize for Literature in Korea and the Malaparte Prize in Italy in 2017, while ‘The White Book’ was a finalist for the Booker International in 2018. The author has also received the Yi Sang Prize, the Young Artist of the Year Award, the 25th Korean Novel Prize, the Hwang Sun-won Literature Prize and the Dong Ri Literature Prize.
The Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded 116 times between 1901 and 2023, with 18 women receiving the award, with the latter being the winner. In the last two years, the award went to Jon Fosse in 2023 –for “his innovative prose that has given voice to the unspeakable”– and to Annie Ernaux in 2022 for “the courage and precision clinic with which he discovers the roots of distancing and collective restrictions of personal memory.”
