The Nobel Prize in Literature has often been criticized for being too focused on European and North American authors, favoring style-heavy, story-light prose over more diverse global storytelling. Nobel Prize in Literature Awarded to Han Kang for Her “Intense Poetic Prose”
Han Kang, praised by the Nobel committee for “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
Han becomes the first South Korean writer to win the prestigious literature prize. Nobel committee chairman Anders Olsson lauded Han’s “physical empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives” in her work, noting that she “confronts historical traumas and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life.” He added that her writing embodies a “unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead,” while her poetic and experimental style has made her an innovator in contemporary prose.
Han, 53, previously won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for The Vegetarian, an unsettling novel in which a woman’s decision to stop eating meat leads to devastating consequences. Upon receiving that award, Han described writing as a way of questioning: “I just try to complete my questions through the process of my writing, and I try to stay in the questions, sometimes painful, sometimes demanding.”
With The Vegetarian, she sought to explore what it means to be human: “I wanted to describe a woman who desperately didn’t want to belong to the human race any longer and who wanted to reject being human, given the violence humans commit.”
Her novel Human Acts was also shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2018. The Nobel Prize in Literature has often been criticized for being too focused on European and North American authors, favoring style-heavy, story-light prose. The prize has also historically been male-dominated, with only 17 women among its 119 laureates before this year. The last woman to win the award was Annie Ernaux of France in 2022.
This year’s Nobel announcements began on Monday, with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the Nobel Prize in Medicine. On Tuesday, the Physics prize was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, two pioneers of machine learning.
South Korean author Han Kang poses for the media during a news conference in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, May 24, 2016. Kang has won the Nobel Prize for Literature.(Photo | AP)
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