Han Kang, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. She has a lot in common with Poland

Since the loud scandal and reset at the Swedish Academy, when the Nobel Prize in Literature was postponed in 2018, Stockholm’s algorithms seem to have been perfectly oiled. They distribute the prize equitably to all continents, languages, genders and literary genres.

Let us remind you: in 2018, the overdue Nobel went to the Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk, in 2019 – to the Austrian essayist and playwright Peter Handke, in 2020 – to the American poet Lousie Glück, in 2021 – to the English-speaking descendant of colonized Africans Abdulrazak Gurnah, in 2022 – to a French woman who writes in a thoroughly personal way. prose (Annie Ernaux). Last year, the winner was Jon Fosse, a Norwegian playwright and novelist. So we could safely bet that this year the distinction would go to a woman from a distant culture (from Europe), whom the West gets to know through translations.

First Hollywood, now awards

53-year-old Han Kang from South Korea was awarded – as a representative of the Swedish Academy said on Thursday in the historic Stock Exchange building – “for her intensely poetic prose, which makes us confront historical traumas and reveals the fragility of human life.” He then added that Han Kang “pays incredible attention to the relationship between body and soul, life and death, and in his style – poetic and experimental – he sets new directions for contemporary prose.”

However, Kang is an interesting winner because she belongs to the strict literary mainstream, which was not so common before. Translations, international awards, film adaptations and hundreds of articles.