The writer of South Korea’s Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature this Thursday “for its intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,” announced the Swedish Academy.
Han Kang, 53, is the first South Korean to receive the prestigious literature award. Parallel to writing, the author dedicated herself to art and music, which is reflected in her entire literary work.
“Han Kang’s work is characterized by this double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental torment and physical torment, in close relationship with Eastern thought,” said the Swedish academy.
The author, born on November 27, 1970 in Gwanju, South Korea, has “a unique awareness of the relationships between body and soul, the living and the dead and, through his poetic and experimental style, is considered an innovator in the field of contemporary prose,” declared the president of the Nobel Committee, Anders Olsson, before the press.
Han Kang became internationally known with his novel “The Vegetarian” (2007). Written in three parts, the work describes the violent consequences of its protagonist, Yeong-hye,’s refusal to eat meat, which provokes the brutal rejection of his environment.
The other South Korean who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize was former president (1998 to 2003) Kim Dae-Jung in 2000 for “his work for peace and reconciliation with North Korea.”
Winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature of the last decade
These were the last ten winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
2024: Han Kang (South Korea) for “his intense poetic prose, which confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
2023: Jon Fosse (Norway) for “his innovative works of theater and prose, which give voice to the unspeakable.”
2022: Annie Ernaux (France) for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she discovers the roots, distances and collective restrictions of personal memory.”
2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah (UK) for “his empathetic and uncompromising account of the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugees caught between cultures and continents.”
2020: Louise Glück (United States) for “her characteristic poetic voice that, with its austere beauty, makes individual existence universal.”
2019: Peter Handke (Austria) for “his influential work that, with much linguistic ingenuity, explored the periphery and singularity of human experience.”
2018: Olga Tokarczuk (Poland) for “a narrative imagination that, with encyclopedic passion, symbolizes the overcoming of borders as a way of life.”
2017: Kazuo Ishiguro (UK) who “has revealed, in novels of powerful emotional force, the abyss beneath our illusory sense of comfort in the world.”
2016: Bob Dylan (United States) for “having created, within the framework of the great tradition of American music, new modes of poetic expression.”
2015: Svetlana Alexievich (Belarus) for “her polyphonic work, a memorial of suffering and courage in our time.”
Source: Ambito
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