Han Kang is awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature
The South Korean novelist Han Kang, author of The Vegetarian, became the first Korean writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Swedish Academy announced on 10 October 2024 that the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2024 had been awarded to the South Korean author Han Kang. The citation praised her intensely poetic prose, which confronts historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life.
Han is the first Korean writer to receive the prize and the eighteenth woman. She is best known in English for The Vegetarian, which won the International Booker Prize in 2016, when she became the first Korean writer to win that award as well. Her other books in English include Greek Lessons.
The prize has been awarded since 1901, and Han was 53 when it was announced.
The Nobel is given for a body of work rather than a single book, and Han's English readership was built largely through translation and through the attention of a translated-fiction prize. That sequence is worth noticing. Prizes for translated fiction do not only reward books; over time they help create the readerships that larger honours then recognise.
Sources: NobelPrize.org: Nobel Prize in Literature 2024, press release; NPR: Han Kang becomes the first South Korean writer to win the Nobel Prize in literature.