By Alex Marshall
Han Kang, the South Korean author best known for “The Vegetarian,” was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday — the first writer from her country to receive the major award.
Mats Malm, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize, said at a news conference in Stockholm that she was receiving the honor “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
Han’s best-known book, “The Vegetarian,” published in South Korea in 2007, won the 2016 International Booker Prize after it was translated into English. In the surreal novel, a depressed housewife shocks her family when she stops eating meat; later, she starves herself, thinking that she can feed off sunlight.
Porochista Khakpour, in a review of “The Vegetarian” for The New York Times, said that Han “has been rightfully celebrated as a visionary in South Korea.”
Han’s other novels include “The White Book,” which was also nominated for the International Booker Prize, and “Greek Lessons,” published in English in 2023. In “Greek Lessons,” a woman loses her ability to speak and tries to restore it by learning ancient Greek. Idra Novey, in a review for the Times, called the novel “a celebration of the ineffable trust to be found in sharing language.”
Anders Olsson, the chair of the Nobel committee, said in a statement Thursday that Han, in her writing, “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.”
Han’s award was a surprise. Before the announcement, the bookmakers’ favorite for this year’s award was Can Xue, an avant-garde Chinese writer of category-defying novels.
The Nobel Prize is literature’s preeminent award, and winning it is a capstone to a writer, poet or playwright’s career. Past recipients have included Toni Morrison, Harold Pinter and, in 2016, Bob Dylan. Along with the prestige and a huge boost in sales, the new laureate receives 11 million Swedish krona (about $1 million).
In recent years, the academy has tried to increase the diversity of authors considered for the literature prize, after facing criticism over the low number of laureates who were female or came from outside Europe and North America.
Since 2020, the academy has awarded the prize to one person of color — Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian writer whose novels dissect the legacy of colonialism — as well as two women: Louise Glück, the American poet, and Annie Ernaux, the French writer of autobiographical works.
Last year’s recipient was Jon Fosse, a Norwegian author and playwright whose novels, told in lengthy sentences, often contain religious undertones.
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