TT News AgencyHan Kang
NOS Nieuws•gisteren, 13:03
This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to South Korean author Han Kang. The jury writes in a press release that 53-year-old Kang deserves the prize for her “intense poetic prose, which confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
Kang already won the prestigious Man Booker International Prize literature prize for her book in 2016 The vegetarian. That book, set in the South Korean capital Seoul, centers on a woman who decides to stop eating meat after a nightmare about the brutality of people. That decision subsequently has all kinds of consequences for her personal life.
The vegetarian marked Kang’s international breakthrough and it also became one of her first books to be translated. She is the first South Korean author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
She is also the seventeenth woman to receive the prize, which has now been presented 119 times in total. Before Kang, French writer Annie Ernaux was the last woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 2022.
Nobel Prizes
There has been no reaction from Kang yet on winning the Nobel Prize. Announcing the award, Mats Malm, secretary of the Swedish Nobel Committee, said he had called Kang as she had just finished dinner. “She wasn’t really prepared for this,” he said. Malm also said he looked forward to meeting Kang in December, when the Nobel Prizes were awarded in Stockholm.
Last year the prize went to Norwegian author Jon Fosse. Fosse wrote plays, novels, poetry collections, essays, children’s books and translations, among other things.
Earlier this week, Nobel Prizes were awarded for Medicine, Physics and Chemistry.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced tomorrow. The Nobel Prize for Economics will be awarded next week. The prizes will be awarded on December 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel.
