South Korean writer Han Kang has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. This was announced by Mats Malm, the awarding secretary of the Swedish Academy, on Thursday afternoon. The jury praised the fifty-three-year-old author for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and reveals how fragile human life is.
Czech readers could familiarize themselves with three prose works from her work. The Odeon publishing house was the first to publish Vegetariana in Petra Ben-Ari’s translation. Her heroine wakes up one day from a bloody nightmare and stops eating meat, but that’s just the beginning of this defiance of society. The author won the Man 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 doesn’t want to belong to the human race anymore. She desperately wants to reject being a part of humanity that commits such violence,” Han Kang said of the character .
Since then, local readers have also been introduced to Where the Grass Blooms, harking back to the 1980 massacre of civilians in Kwangju, South Korea, and The White Book, an intimate meditation on color and an autobiographical meditation on the death of the narrator’s sister. All three works were published by Odeon, which is preparing a fourth title next year called Neloučim se forever.
Revealing the relationship between mental and physical torment is typical for Han Kang’s work. It is closely related to Eastern thought. In her texts, the writer copes with historical traumas and invisible social rules. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and her poetic, experimental style has made her an innovator of contemporary prose, according to the Swedish Academy.
The chairman of the Nobel committee for literature Anders Olsson praises her ability to “physically empathize with vulnerable, often female lives” through fictional characters. Han Kang writes “intensely lyrical prose that is both tender and cruel and sometimes slightly surreal,” adds committee member Anna-Karin Palm.
Han Kang was born in 1970 in Kwangju, South Korea. She moved to Seoul with her family when she was nine years old. He comes from a literary background, his father is a renowned writer.
Han Kang doesn’t just write novels. She began her literary career with the publication of poems in 1993, and also published short stories.
The Ladbrokes bookmaker’s favorite to win this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature was the avant-garde Chinese writer Chan Sue. The British company put the highest price on it, just like last year, when the Norwegian writer and playwright Jón Fosse finally received the award. Since 2015, Ladbrokes predictions for winners have not come true once.
The Nobel Prizes are awarded in the same order every year: medicine goes first on Monday, physics a day later, then chemistry. Thursday belongs to literature, Friday to the peace award. The following Monday, the series is always closed with an award for economics.
The prizes are associated with a reward of 11 million Swedish crowns, which translates to about 24 million Czech crowns. The awards will be presented at a ceremony on December 10, i.e. the anniversary of the death of the founder of the award and the inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel.
Of the Czech writers, only Jaroslav Seifert received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1984.