Han Kang Wins The Nobel Prize For Literature. She’s The First South Korean To Do So

STOCKHOLM – South Korean poet and novelist Han Kang received the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday for a beautiful and frightening body of work that, according to the Nobel committee, “confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

Han, a slow-burning international literary sensation who has won numerous accolades in South Korea and Europe, is the first Asian woman and South Korean writer to receive the Nobel Literature Prize. She received awards for books like “The Vegetarian” and “Human Acts,” which examine the anguish of being human and the wounds of Korea’s violent history.

Anna-Karin Palm, a Nobel literature committee member, stated that Han writes about “trauma, pain, and loss,” whether individual or collective, “with the same compassion and care.”

Han Kang Wins The Nobel Prize For Literature. She’s The First South Korean To Do So

“And this, I think, is something that is quite remarkable,” Mr. Palm added.

Anders Olsson, the Nobel committee chairman, complimented Han’s “empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives” of her characters.

“She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead,” according to Olsson.

Han is the second South Korean to earn the Nobel Prize. The late former President Kim Dae-Jung received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 for his efforts to restore democracy in South Korea under the country’s previous military administration and improve relations with war-torn adversary North Korea.

Han told the Swedish Academy over the phone that she had just finished dinner with her son at home in Seoul when she received the news.

She stated that she was both “honored” and shocked to be South Korea’s first Nobel literature laureate.

“I grew up with Korean literature, and I feel very connected to it,” said Han, whose father and brother are both novelists. “So I hope this news is nice for Korean literature readers and my friends, writers.”

She added, “I’m going to have tea with my son and I’ll celebrate it quietly tonight.”

Han receives the Nobel Prize at a time when South Korean culture is gaining global traction, as seen by the recent success of films such as director Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning “Parasite,” the Netflix survival drama “Squid Game,” and the global recognition of K-pop groups such as BTS and BLACKPINK.

Han, 53, won the International Booker Prize for fiction translated into English in 2016 for “The Vegetarian,” an unnerving novel about a woman who decides to stop eating meat, which has disastrous effects.

Accepting the honor, Han stated that creating novels “is a way of questioning for me.”

“I just try to complete my questions through the process of my writing and I try to stay in the questions, sometimes painful, sometimes — well — sometimes demanding,” she told me.

Han began publishing as a poet in 1993, followed by a short story collection in 1995 and a novel, “Black Deer,” in 1998.

“Greek Lessons” — about the interaction between a woman who can no longer speak and a teacher who is losing his sight — “Human Acts” and “The White Book,” a poetic novel based on the loss of Han’s older sister shortly after birth. “The White Book” was a nominee for the International Booker Prize in 2018.

“Human Acts,” described as “witness literature” by Nobel committee chair Olsson, is based on the real-life death of pro-democracy protestors in Han’s hometown of Gwangju in 1980. The novel earned Italy’s Malaparte Prize in 2017.

Her most recent novel, “We Do Not Part,” will be released in English next year. It also addresses a period in South Korea’s 20th-century history that saw the country go through war, the separation of the Korean peninsula, and tyranny. The story is about a 1948-1949 revolt on Jeju, an island south of the Korean peninsula, in which thousands of people were massacred.

Anders Karlsson, a lecturer at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies who has translated Han into Swedish, said he was “overjoyed” with the Nobel award.

He reported that Han’s “poignant, condensed” style has the ability to explain “difficult and dark passages in South Korean history … in quite open and inviting language that engages and does not deter the reader.”

Han Kang Wins The Nobel Prize For Literature. She’s The First South Korean To Do So

The literature prize has long been criticized for focusing too much on European and North American writers of style-heavy, story-light prose. It has also been male-dominated, with Han becoming only the 18th woman among its 120 laureates.

Six days of Nobel announcements began Monday, with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine award. The physics prize went to two machine learning pioneers, John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton. On Wednesday, three scientists who discovered strong tools for decoding and even designing novel proteins received the chemistry prize.

The Nobel Peace Prize will be revealed on Friday, followed by the economics award on Monday.

The prize includes a financial reward of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a gift made by the award’s originator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates will collect their honors at ceremonies on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

SOURCE | AP