Nobel Prize in Literature to Han Kang of South Korea

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Surprise prize winner

Han Kang had just had dinner with her son when he reached her by phone at home in Seoul, the academy’s permanent secretary, Mats Malm, said at the award announcement Thursday in Stockholm’s old town. “She wasn’t really prepared for this,” he said. We look forward to welcoming them to the award ceremony in Stockholm in December. “Han Kang’s physical compassion for vulnerable, often female lives is evident and enhanced by her metaphorically charged prose,” Anders Olsson, Chairman of the Nobel Literature Committee, said at the announcement. She has a particular awareness of the connections between body and soul as well as the living and the dead. “With her poetic and experimental style, she is an innovator in contemporary prose,” says Olsson.

Jury statement

Han Kang is being honored “for her intense poetic prose that deals with historical trauma and reveals the fragility of human life,” according to a Swedish Academy statement. “She has a particular understanding of the connections between body and soul, living and dead, and is an innovator in contemporary prose with her poetic and experimental style.”

She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 with the English translation of her profound first novel, “The Vegetarian,” first published in 2007. For the jury it was a “moving and suggestive” novel that “surprises the depth of its strangeness. ” Originally sketched as a biography of a “completely invisible” woman who decides to become a vegetarian, the novel, later made into a film, turns into a wonderful story full of depth and passion, in which the rejection of social norms or health instead of the. the smooth surface of society strictly conforming causes a deep crack. The book, which was translated into many languages ​​and made into a film, brought her international success. On 9 May 2025, a play directed by Marie Schleef will premiere at the Vienna Academy Theatre. Ö1 broadcast the radio drama version of her novel in 2018.

More about this in the Ö1 radio drama search

In her novel “Men’s Work” (published in German in 2017), the South Korean woman dealt with a student uprising in 1980, which was responded to with incredible violence by the military regime at the time. The novel “Your Cold Hands” (in German 2019) was about women with eating disorders, patriarchal power relations and the male gaze on the female body. In 2020 her book “Weiß” was published in German, in which she mourned her unknown sister, who died immediately after birth, in poetic condensations and reflections. Recently, her novel “Greek Lessons” was published in German this year, in which she tells the story of two ordinary people who come together in a moment of private fear.

In the late 2000s, Han struggled with writer’s block, which came to her out of nowhere and which she could only overcome with meditative patience. However, she says of her life as a writer: “Writing is also a source of joy for me.”

In her home country, where she won the Korean Novel Award in 1999, among other literary awards, Han Kang is considered the most widely read author in years. However, the website of South Korea’s leading bookseller briefly crashed on Thursday after the award was announced. Bookstore chain Kyobo Book Center in Seoul did not have enough copies of the author in stock because they did not expect her to make a profit, an employee said.

The 53-year-old is the first woman among the winners of the Nobel Prize announced so far this year, the first author from her country and at the same time the 18th woman to be awarded the most prestigious award in the literary world on her. Since the prize was first awarded in 1901, 116 winners of the Nobel Prize for literature have been named, including world-renowned writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Selma Lagerlöf and Jean-Paul Sartre, but also personalities such as former Prime Minister the British. Winston Churchill and the US musician Bob Dylan, who are not necessarily first associated with world literature. The last winner who spoke German was the Austrian Peter Handke five years ago. Elfriede Jelinek was awarded in 2004.

Better you

In the last two years, Norway’s Jon Fosse and Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature. At that time, the former two were among the favorite circle.

The betting odds gave the best chance to the Chinese Deng Xiaohua, who writes under the pseudonym Can Xue, followed by the bestselling Japanese author Haruki Murakami, the Argentinian César Aira and the Greek author Ersi Sotiropoulos. The Canadian Margaret Atwood, the American Thomas Pynchon and the Romanian Mircea Cărtărescu, who publishes with the Austrian Zsolnay Verlag, have been on the list for years. Surprisingly, the Tyrolean Norbert Gstrein, who lives in Hamburg, recently reached the top spots among bookmakers. According to the academy, nearly 200 names made it onto the expanded list of candidates – one of which has traditionally been kept secret for 50 years.

The other Nobel Prizes

The winners in the scientific categories of medicine, physics and chemistry were announced earlier this week – so far there have been seven men and no women. On Friday it is the turn of the Nobel Peace Prize; the result will not be announced in Stockholm like the other Nobel Prizes, but in Oslo. Next Monday, the economics category will conclude the annual Nobel Prize announcements.

More for this i science.ORF.ag

The famous Nobel medals are traditionally awarded on December 10th, coinciding with the death of prize founder and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896).

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Building a publishing house – Han Kang

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