South Korean writer Han Kang won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. The Academy praised her “intensely poetic prose that confronts historical trauma and reveals the fragility of life”. Her books Vegetarian, Where the Grass Grows and White Book were published in Czech.
Fifty-three-year-old Han Kang became famous worldwide mainly for her novel Vegetarian from 2007, which depicts the violent consequences that the main character experiences after she refuses to eat meat and causes a shock in the surrounding society with her consistently enforced vegetarianism. The writer received the Booker International Prize for her novel in 2016.
“I wanted to ask questions about what it means to be human and I wanted to portray a woman who desperately no longer wants to belong to the human race and who desperately wants to reject being a part of humanity that commits such violence,” Han Kang previously said of The Vegetarian.
Nobel Committee for Literature chairman Anders Olsson praised the author’s ability to “physically empathize with vulnerable, often female lives” through her characters. Han Kang writes “intensely lyrical prose that is both tender and cruel and sometimes slightly surreal,” said committee member Anna-Karin Palmová.
Han Kang’s work is characterized by revealing the relationship between mental and physical suffering and has a close connection to Eastern thought. The South Korean writer copes with the traumas of history and invisible rules in her work. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and her poetic and experimental style has made her an innovator in contemporary prose art, according to the Swedish Academy.
Han Kang was born in 1970 in the South Korean city of Gwangju. At the age of nine, she and her family moved to Seoul. She comes from a literary background, her father is a renowned writer. Han Kang doesn’t just write novels. She started her literary career by publishing poems in 1993 and is also a short story writer.
Of the 121 laureates to date, Han Kang is only the eighteenth woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Swedish Academy’s choice confirmed literary experts who predicted that a non-Western author would receive the award this year.
The most prestigious literary award, which is associated with a reward of 11 million Swedish crowns (24 million CZK), is awarded by the Swedish Academy on the basis of nominations by experts from all over the world. Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse won the award last year.
