The Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to South Korean author Han Kang. The Swedish Academy praises her for her ‘intense poetic prose that addresses historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life’.
Han Kang was born on November 27, 1970 in the South Korean city of Gwangju. When she was nine, the family moved to the capital Seoul. She studied at Yonsei University.
She made her debut with poems in 1993, followed two years later by her prose debut, the short story collection Love of Yeosu. With the novel The vegetarian (채식주의자) from 2007 (made into a film in 2009), she made her international breakthrough in 2015. That year a Dutch translation by Monique Eggermont was also published by Nijgh & Van Ditmar. The book became a bestseller worldwide and won Han Kang the International Man Booker Prize.
Other books of hers translated into Dutch are: I’m not saying goodbye(translated by Mattho Mandersloot), People work in Wit (the last two novels have been translated by Marijke Versluys and Deborah Smith).
In addition to a medal, the winner of the Nobel Prize will receive an amount of 970,000 euros. It is the eighteenth time that the prize has been awarded to a woman, in a series of 117 laureates in total. The festive ceremony will take place in December.
Drawing of the laureate: Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach.
