The Nobel Prize for Literature goes to South Korean writer Han Kang

2024-10-10 11:04:00

This time the prestigious prize goes to South Korea. The academy awarded the South Korean Han Kang for her “intense poetic prose” which reveals “the fragility of human life”.

South Korean writer Han Kang will receive this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. This was announced by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. He will receive the most prestigious literary prize in the world for “his intense poetic prose that addresses historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life”, as the permanent secretary of the Academy, Mats Malm, said during the announcement of the prize in the historic center of Stockholm.

Han Kang is the eighteenth woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature and the first woman among the Nobel Prize winners announced so far this year. At the same time, it is the first time that a Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to a person from the Korean-speaking world.

Han Kang received the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 for his bestseller “The Vegetarian”. The novel is about a woman who transforms into a plant through her passive attitude of refusal. It is probably Hang Kang’s best-known work to date and has also been widely received in the German-speaking world, with critics comparing it to Murakami, Kafka and Hemingway.

Han Kang was born in Gwangju in 1970. At the age of ten he moved to Seoul with his family. He studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. Han made her literary debut with five poems, including “Winter in Seoul”, in the winter issue of the magazine “Literature and Society” in 1993. The following year she began her successful career as a writer, and in 1994 she won a literary prize. competition with “Red Anchor” in Seoul, Korean Fiction Prize in 1999. Other awards followed, including abroad: in addition to the Booker International Prize (2016), he won the Malaparte Prize in Italy (2017) and the Prix Médicis étranger in France (2023).

The story “The Fruits of My Wife” was published in 2005 as the first work in German translation, in an anthology on the occasion of South Korea, host country of the Frankfurt Book Fair. Other works in German translation have been published by Aufbau-Verlag, such as “Vegetarian”, the novel “Human Work” (2017), which is about the Gwangju massacre during the South Korean military dictatorship, and “Your Cold Hands”. (2019), “White” (2020) and more recently “Lezioni di Grecia” (2020).

Last year the Nobel Prize for Literature went to the Norwegian Jon Fosse. He was awarded for his innovative works and for his prose, which “gives voice to the unspeakable”, as the Academy said at the time. The year before, the Frenchwoman Annie Ernaux, another great name in world literature, had been declared the winner of the Nobel Prize.

Since the prize was first awarded in 1901, a total of 121 Nobel Prize winners have been named. These include world-famous writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Selma Lagerlöf and Jean-Paul Sartre, but also personalities such as the former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the American musician Bob Dylan, who are not initially necessarily associated with world literature. The last German winners were Herta Müller 15 and Günter Grass 25 years ago, the last German-speaking Austrian Peter Handke five years ago.

After the announcement reported in the literature, the Nobel Prize event now temporarily moves from Stockholm to Oslo: While the first four announcements traditionally take place in the Swedish capital, the Nobel Peace Prize winner always follows on Friday in Norway. Finally, next Monday it will be announced who will receive the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, sponsored by the Swedish central bank, also in Stockholm.

dpa/ll/rei