Nobel Prize 2024 – Surprise: South Korea’s Han Kang wins Nobel Prize in Literature – Culture

For the first time, the world’s most prestigious literary prize is going to South Korea. Han Kang is being honored for her “intense poetic prose” and her literary treatment of historical trauma.

Author:

Tim Felchlin

10.10.2024, 01:05

Han Kang was having dinner with her son when her phone rang. “She was not prepared for this,” said Swedish Academy spokesman Mats Malm, “but we have already started talking about the preparations for December.” Then the Nobel Prize will be awarded to Han Kang.

Han Kang is the first woman from South Korea to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Academy in Stockholm honors the author “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical trauma and reveals the fragility of human life.”

The collective trauma is formative

Han Kang was born in Gwangju in 1970. The city declined in history thanks to a student uprising against the military government in 1980. The suppression of the democracy movement in her home country also shaped her literary work. Her novel “Human Work” is an attempt to come to grips with this massacre and its consequences.

Legend:

Han Kang is the 18th woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature – and the first woman among the Nobel Prize winners announced so far this year.

Getty Images / Roberto Ricciuti

Before Han Kang wrote her first novels, she published poems and stories in 1993. Themes that run through Han’s literary work are sadness, violence and criticism of patriarchy, but also the kindness in people.

A radical rejection of humanity

For a long time, the South Korean author was an unknown author in German-speaking countries. That suddenly changed when her book “The Vegetarian” was published in German in 2016 and won the prestigious “Man Booker International Prize”.

“The Vegetarian” tells the story of a housewife who ends up giving up meat and wants to become a plant. Denying the protagonist, Han Kang shows the suffering of women’s bodies in patriarchy.

Free anti-violence literature,

Han Kang’s literature opposes all forms of brutality. Their lyrics are strong messages about a non-violent human life. Her language is calm and sensitive – and therefore even more penetrating.

Three reading recommendations

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• “The vegetarian”: A story about a young woman who decides overnight to give up meat. The sometimes violent reactions that the decision provokes among the male family members in the rest of the story problematize the female body as a precarious place that does not entirely belong to its owner. The appeal of this novel lies in its disturbing nature, in the way it stirs and amuses us with funny scenes and then captivates us with its poetic beauty.

• “Your cold hands”: When the sculptor Jang Unhyong disappears without a trace one day, he leaves behind a large number of plaster casts of women’s hands, some of them completely cast. Many of these are negative images of a student, L., an overweight young woman who has struggled with an eating disorder throughout her life. The book tells the tension between inside and outside, between heart and shell, between existence and appearance, but it also shows the ancient relationship of the male creator and the female muse.
• «Weiss»: A long poem that must be read in the dead of winter. The book tells about white things – snow white, diaper white, mother’s milk white. Behind these things, the narrator’s (verified autobiographically) shimmers with a memory that lies ahead of her time: the memory of her older sister, who died as a newborn in her mother’s arms. The lyrical texts are tackling this silent tragedy that has shaped the life of the family and that imposes itself on the narrator in the whiteness of certain things.

(Salomé Meier, literary scholar and podcaster)

The author herself speaks quietly and calmly. In her interviews, she repeatedly talks about how disturbed she is by human violence and how fragile human dignity is.

Kang was not one of the favorites

Han Kang has a radical outlook and the Stockholm Academy praised the author as a “contemporary prose innovator”. Her choice is surprising, however, because Han Kang is a relatively young author with a relatively narrow body of work.

The public is more interested in Han Kang’s future works. A new novel is appearing next year – and according to the decision of the academy, certainly in a German translation as well.

The prizes were awarded according to Alfred Nobel’s last wishes

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Legend:

The Nobel Prizes have been awarded since 1901.

Keystone / FERNANDO VERGARA

According to Nobel’s will, the Nobel Prizes are designed to honor those who have contributed the most to humanity in each category in the previous year. They can go to a single prize winner or up to three people chosen at the same time. Especially in the science categories, it often happens that several award winners are honored together, for example, they have researched the same subject.

All Nobel Prizes are traditionally awarded on the anniversary of Nobel’s death on December 10. This year, it is again worth eleven million Swedish kroner (about 910,000 Swiss francs) per category. If two people share the honor, this prize money will be shared between them.

Send notice

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The Kultur-Talk program on Radio SRF2 Kultur will be dedicated in detail to Nobel Prize winner Han Kang on October 11 at 9:00 am and 6:30 pm

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News SRF 4, 10/10/2024, 1:00 pm