The Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to South Korean author Han Kang (pic) for what the Nobel committee called “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.
Nobel committee chairman Anders Olsson yesterday praised Han’s “physical empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives” of her characters.
He said her work “confronts historical traumas and in each of her works exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in a poetic and experimental style, has become an innovator in contemporary prose.”
Han becomes the first South Korean writer to win the Nobel literature prize.
She also becomes the second South Korean national to win a Nobel Prize, after late former President Kim Dae-jung won the peace prize in 2000.
He was honoured for his efforts to restore democracy in South Korea during the country’s previous military rule and improve relations with war-divided rival North Korea.
Nobel literature committee member Anna-Karin Palm said Han writes “intense lyrical prose that is both tender and brutal, and sometimes slightly surrealistic as well.”
Han, 53, won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for The Vegetarian, an unsettling novel in which a woman’s decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences.
At the time of winning that award, Han said writing 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 said.
With The Vegetarian, she said, “I wanted to question about being human and I wanted to describe a woman who desperately didn’t want to belong to the human race any longer and desperately wanted to reject being human, (humans) who commit such violence.”
The literature prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers of style-heavy, story-light prose. — AP
