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The laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2024 is South Korean Han Kang.
“In his work, he deals with historical traumas and invisible social rules, and in each of his works he reveals the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and with her poetic and experimental style she has become an innovator of contemporary prose,” writes the Swedish Academy in an official statement on the award.
“Her prose is fragile and brutal, sometimes slightly surreal. Her themes are continuous, but Han Kang always presents them in new formal transformations,” added a member of the committee for literature at the press conference of the Swedish Academy.
Han Kang is the first South Korean writer to win the Nobel Prize. She was born in 1970 in the city of Gwangju, and debuted with a collection of short stories in 1995. She became famous around the world with her novel Vegetarian Girl (2007), for which she won the prestigious International Booker Prize. The Vegetarian tells the story of a South Korean woman whose decision to stop eating meat arouses unexpectedly brutal reactions from those around her.
Her works were also translated into Czech. The novels Vegetarian Girl (2017), Where the Grass Blooms (2018) and White Book (2019) were published here. All were prepared for publication by the Odeon publishing house and translated by the Korean writer Petra Ben Ari.
Han Kang in Czech
“I’m very happy, I didn’t expect it, but probably not many people,” says publisher Jindřich Jůzl, who got acquainted with the work of the South Korean writer at the Frankfurt book fair, about the Han Kang award. “I’m glad I made the decision to publish Han Kang eight years ago. At that time, I was interested in The Vegetarian, a novel about the clash in Korean society. A woman who goes vegetarian actually represents resistance to her husband. Society in South Korea seems to be very male oriented. We will be publishing her new book soon.’
“Despite the fact that historical events are now being written about, Han Kang still strikes me as an inner author,” adds Czech translator Petra Ben Ari. “There is a lot of introspection in her books and they deal with fundamental questions such as: What is the point of being here at all? Han Kang explores the responsibility of the living. We got a gift. If we have it, how come we can be so cruel to others?’
The Nobel Prize for Literature on the Seznam Správy website
Which laureates did we write about? Read book reviews by Olga Tokarczuk or Annie Ernaux.
Ben Ari goes on to add to the award-winning writer that she is not afraid of experimenting. “He builds dialect into his books, which is obviously a nightmare for translators. It tries to enliven the narrative through a different way of retrospection or changing perspectives. What I appreciate about her is that she is terribly minimalistic. He uses language in such a crystalline way that it cannot be made into a bloated, exaggerated and introspective self-servingness.”
What does Han Kang’s formal innovation look like in practice? The novel Where the Grass Blooms, about the massacre of the night of May 27, 1980 in Kwangju, South Korea, is partly told in the plural by a pile of dead bodies. The fact that the corpses address the reader with a clear “you” also has a terrifying effect in the book. As if they want us to ask ourselves uncomfortable questions when we open the book.
Who lost the prize?
The secretary of the Swedish Academy, Mats Malm, admitted that when announcing the happy event, he caught the South Korean writer surprised at the moment she was preparing dinner for her son. He added that he is looking forward to meeting Han Kang in December when she is expected to come to Sweden to receive the award, which has been won by only 17 women in the history of the award.
Together with the prize, Han Kang will receive a financial reward worth SEK 11 million (converted to CZK 24 million). At 53, she will become the second youngest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature after Rudyard Kipling, the British poet who was awarded at the age of 41 in 1907.
Bookmakers have already predicted several times that the Nobel Prize for literature will be won by the Chinese writer Chan Sue this year, among the hot candidates were the Canadian Margaret Atwood or the regular from Japan, the popular novelist Haruki Murakami or the British writer with Indian roots Salman Rushdie.
Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize for literature last year. “Fosse is one of those authors you feel guilty for not having heard of, or not keeping your own promise to read (probably sometime in October, after one major announcement from Stockholm), ” he predicted the Nobel Prize reviewer Septologie Randy Boyadoga pro New York Times.
Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuková (2018), Austrian writer Peter Handke (2019), American poet Luise Glück (2020), Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah (2021) or French novelist Annie Ernauxová (2022) also appeared among recent laureates.
