South Korea's Han Kang wins 2024 Nobel literature prize (updated)

China Literature

10/10/2024 12:05

(Adds quote, details in paragraphs 3-9)
    By Simon Johnson and Niklas Pollard
       STOCKHOLM, Oct 10 (Reuters) - South Korean author Han
Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for "her intense
poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the
fragility of human life," the award-giving body said on
Thursday.
    The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11
million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).
    "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," Anders Olsson, chairman of the academy's Nobel
Committee, said in a statement.
    Han Kang, the first South Korean to win the literature
prize, began her career in 1993 with the publication of a number
of poems in the magazine Literature and Society, while her prose
debut came in 1995 with the short story collection "Love of
Yeosu".
    Her major international breakthrough came with the novel
"The Vegetarian".
    Bookmaker favourites ahead of the announcement included
Chinese writer Can Xue and many other perennial possible
candidates such as Kenya's Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Australia's Gerald
Murnane and Canada's Anne Carson.
    The literature prize is the most accessible of the Nobels
for many and, as such, the Academy's choices are met with praise
and criticism, often in equal measure.
    The Academy's omission of literary giants such as Russia's
Leo Tolstoy, France's Emile Zola and Ireland's James Joyce has
left many book-lovers scratching their heads over the last
century.
    The 2016 prize award to American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan
was hailed as radical rethink about what literature is, but also
seen as a snub to authors in more traditional genres.
    The prizes, for achievements in science, literature and
peace, were created through a bequest in the will of Swedish
dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel. They have been
awarded since 1901, with the final prize in the line-up -
economics - being a later addition.
    After peace, the literature award tends to garner the most
attention, thrusting authors into the global spotlight and
yielding a spike in book sales that can, however, be relatively
short-lived for authors who are not household names.      
    Even so, the prize money and a place on a list that includes
luminaries such as Irish poet W.B. Yeats, who won in 1923,
American novelist Ernest Hemingway, who took the award in 1954,
and Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner in 1982, is an
appealing proposition.
    Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse won in 2023.
    The fourth award to be handed out every year, the literature
prize follows those for medicine, physics and chemistry
announced earlier this week.  
($1 = 10.3978 Swedish crowns)

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Nobel laureates    https://www.reuters.com/graphics/NOBEL-PRIZE/010050ZC27H/
 
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 (Reporting by Niklas Pollard, Simon Johnson and Johan Ahlander
in Stockholm and Justyna Pawlak in Warsaw; additional reporting
by Terje Solsvik in Oslo; Editing by Alex Richardson)
 ((simon.c.johnson@thomsonreuters.com; +46 70 721 1045; Reuters
Messaging: simon.c.johnson.reuters.com@reuters.net))