STOCKHOLM: South Korean author Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for "her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life", the award-giving body said on Thursday.
The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).
"She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose," Anders Olsson, chairman of the Academy's Nobel Committee, said in a statement.
Han Kang, the first South Korean and the 18th woman to win the literature prize, began her career in 1993 with the publication of a number of poems in the magazine Literature and Society, while her prose debut came in 1995 with the short story collection "Love of Yeosu".
Born in 1970, she comes from a literary background, her father being a well-regarded novelist.
Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction for her novel "The Vegetarian" in 2016, the first of her novels to be translated into English and regarded as her major international breakthrough.
In "The Vegetarian", after struggling with gruesome recurring nightmares, Yeong-hye, a dutiful wife, rebels against societal norms, forsaking meat and stirring concern among her family that she is mentally ill.
"She is exploited erotically and aesthetically by her brother-in-law, a video artist who becomes obsessed with her passive body (and) ... sinks ever deeper into a psychosis-like condition expressed through the 'flaming trees', a symbol for a plant kingdom that is as enticing as it is dangerous," according to the Academy's description.
In an interview with the Booker Prizes published last year, Han Kang described how the writing of "The Vegetarian" had been a difficult period in her life where she questioned whether should be able to finish the novel or even survive as an author.
"I was suffering from severe arthritis in my fingers, so I wrote the first two parts at a leisurely pace, using a felt-tip pen that glided smoothly across the paper, and then typed out the last part holding two ballpoint pens upside down," she said.
"To this day, I feel awkward when I hear about the novel's ‘success'."
Two of her books have been made into films; "The Vegetarian" in 2009, directed by Lim Woo-Seong, and 2011's "Scars", by the same director. The Nobel prizes were created through a bequest in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel and began in 1901. — Reuters
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
