STOCKHOLM: South Korean writer Han Kang received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for “her intense poetic prose that confronts historic traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”, the award-giving physique stated on Thursday (Oct 10).
The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is price 11 million Swedish crowns (US$1.1 million).
“She has a singular consciousness of the connections between physique and soul, the residing and the lifeless, and in her poetic and experimental model has turn out to be an innovator in modern prose,” Anders Olsson, chairman of the academy’s Nobel Committee, stated in an announcement.
Han Kang, the primary South Korean to win the literature prize, started her profession in 1993 with the publication of quite a lot of poems within the journal Literature and Society, whereas her prose debut got here in 1995 with the quick story assortment Love of Yeosu.
Born in 1970, she comes from a literary background, her father being a well-regarded novelist.
Han Kang received the Man Booker Worldwide Prize for fiction for her novel “The Vegetarian” in 2016, the primary of her novels to be translated into English and thought to be her main worldwide breakthrough.
In “The Vegetarian”, after combating grotesque recurring nightmares, Yeong-hye, a dutiful spouse, rebels in opposition to societal norms, forsaking meat and stirring concern amongst her household that she is mentally sick.
Two of her books have been made into movies: “The Vegetarian” in 2009, directed by Lim Woo-seong, and 2011’s “Scars”, by the identical director.
Her 2002 novel “Your Chilly Palms”, which bears apparent traces of Han Kang’s curiosity in artwork, reproduces a manuscript left behind by a lacking sculptor who’s obsessive about making plaster casts of feminine our bodies.
“There’s a preoccupation with the human anatomy and the play between persona and expertise, the place a battle arises within the work of the sculptor between what the physique reveals and what it conceals,” the Academy stated in an official biography.
She is the second South Korean to win a Nobel prize ever, after 2000 peace prize winner and former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung.
“ORDINARY DAY”
Bookmaker favourites forward of the announcement included Chinese language author Can Xue and plenty of different perennial potential candidates resembling Kenya’s Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Australia’s Gerald Murnane and Canada’s Anne Carson.
“I used to be in a position to speak to Han Kang over the telephone,” Mats Malm, Everlasting Secretary of the Swedish Academy informed a press convention.
“She was having an odd day, it appears, she had simply completed supper together with her son,” he stated.
The literature prize is essentially the most accessible of the Nobels for a lot of and, as such, the Academy’s selections are met with reward and criticism, typically in equal measure.
The Academy’s omission of literary giants resembling Russia’s Leo Tolstoy, France’s Emile Zola and Eire’s James Joyce has left many book-lovers scratching their heads over the past century.
The 2016 prize award to American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was hailed as a radical rethink about what literature is, but additionally seen as a snub to authors in additional conventional genres.
The prizes, for achievements in science, literature and peace, have been created by means of a bequest within the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel. They’ve been awarded since 1901, with the ultimate prize within the line-up – economics – being a later addition.
After peace, the literature award tends to garner essentially the most consideration, thrusting authors into the worldwide highlight and yielding a spike in ebook gross sales that may, nevertheless, be comparatively short-lived for authors who are usually not family names.
Even so, the prize cash and a spot on an inventory that features luminaries resembling Irish poet WB Yeats, who received in 1923, American novelist Ernest Hemingway, who took the award in 1954, and Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner in 1982, is an interesting proposition.
Norwegian writer and dramatist Jon Fosse received in 2023.
The fourth award to be handed out yearly, the literature prize follows these for medication, physics and chemistry introduced earlier this week.
