2024 Nobel Prize in Literature To South Korean Author Han Kang
It's Nobel time! Today the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2024 was awarded to South Korean author Han Kang "for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.
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.
Her prose debut came in 1995 with the short story collection “Love of Yeosu”, followed soon afterwards by several other prose works, both novels and short stories, notable among these being the novel “Your Cold Hands”. Han Kang’s major international breakthrough came with the novel The Vegetarian. Written in three parts, the book portrays the violent consequences that ensue when its protagonist Yeong-hye refuses to submit to the norms of food intake. A more plot-based book is The Wind Blows, Go, a large and complex novel about friendship and artistry, in which grief and a longing for transformation are strongly present. Han Kang’s physical empathy for extreme life stories is reinforced by her increasingly charged metaphorical style. Greek Lessons is a captivating portrayal of an extraordinary relationship between two vulnerable individuals.
In the novel Human Acts, Han Kang employs as her political foundation a historical event that took place in the city of Gwangju, where she herself grew up and where hundreds of students and unarmed civilians were murdered during a massacre carried out by the South Korean military in 1980.
In The White Book, Han Kang’s poetic style once again dominates. The book is an elegy dedicated to the person who could have been the narrative self’s elder sister, but who passed away only a couple of hours after birth. Another highlight is the late work We Do Not Part from 2021, which in terms of its imagery of pain is closely connected to The White Book. The story unfolds in the shadow of a massacre that took place in the late 1940s on South Korea’s Jeju Island, where tens of thousands of people, among them children and the elderly, were shot on suspicion of being collaborators.
Han Kang’s work is characterized by this double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental and physical torment with close connections to Eastern thinking. According to Anders Olsson, Chairman of the Nobel Committee, "Han Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules 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 her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose."
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