South Korean writer Han Kang gets 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature

South Korean author Han Kang (53) has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,” the Swedish Academy announced on Thursday (October 10).

Known for her haunting, lyrical style and penetrating explorations of pain and memory, Han Kang’s oeuvre confronts historical and personal traumas with a vivid urgency.

In his statement, Anders Olsson, Chairman of the Nobel Committee, underlined Han Kang’s role as an “innovator in contemporary prose.” Her work has consistently dismantled assumptions about cultural norms, presenting human existence as fragile, complex, and often marred by forces beyond individual control. By defying conventions of resolution, Han Kang brings readers face-to-face with the uncomfortable truth of life’s frailties and its haunting, inevitable suffering.

Kang's novels, novellas, essays and short story collections are explorations into patriarchy, violence, grief and humanity. Born in 1970 in Gwangju, South Korea, Han Kang’s origins made her aware of humanity’s vulnerabilities.

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Having moved with her family to Seoul at the age of nine, Han Kang, daughter of novelist Han Seung-won, was raised in an environment steeped in literature, with her father a novelist in his own right. She debuted in 1993 with poetry and expanded into prose, exploring the themes of art, anatomy, and silence that would define her early works.

This grounding in poetry endowed her prose with a poignant brevity, as seen in her first short story collection, Love of Yeosu (1995). In 2007, she would publish The Vegetarian, her breakout novel that earned international acclaim after its English translation (by Deborah Smith in 2015), won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize.

Literature as witness

Han’s works challenge readers by making them witnesses to unspeakable acts. Her novel Human Acts (2014), set against the brutal backdrop of the 1980 Gwangju Massacre, showcases her trademark approach: a mix of poetry, witness literature, and philosophical interrogation. Through a piercing narrative style that allows the dead to narrate their suffering, Han Kang delivers a powerful indictment of history’s forgotten cruelties. Readers are invited not just to watch but to reckon with the silent agony of those erased by social amnesia.

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The Vegetarian follows protagonist Yeong-hye as she disrupts social conventions with her simple refusal to eat meat, an act that spirals into catastrophic consequences in her family. This silent defiance, devoid of explicit explanations, captures a broader resistance to social impositions. Han Kang’s refusal to moralise or clarify Yeong-hye’s motivations betrays her narrative style: no tidy resolutions, only raw defiance against imposed normalcy.

Han Kang’s more recent novels like Greek Lessons (2011) and The White Book (2016) draw readers into the metaphysical realm. Greek Lessons tells the story of a mute woman and her teacher, each grappling with physical limitations — speechlessness and blindness, respectively. In these characters’ frailties, Han Kang portrays a love born not of passion but of mutual vulnerability, showing the limits of language and human connection. In The White Book, Han uses the colour white as a recurring theme to explore grief and memory, weaving an elegy for a sister who never lived. The work rejects conventional narrative structure, presenting instead a sequence of poetic meditations that circle around absence and the intangible nature of loss.

The arcs of trauma

In We Do Not Part (2021), Han Kang addresses collective trauma through the massacre of Jeju Island’s citizens in the 1940s, an incident mired in a dark legacy of silence and shame. Through her characters, she transforms grief into art, illustrating how personal and historical wounds can yield beauty when shared. By interweaving imagery of nightmares with raw memories, the novel exemplifies her thematic dedication to exploring suffering’s role in the human experience.

Han Kang’s oeuvre resonates deeply with Eastern philosophy, particularly in her portrayal of physical and existential suffering. Her characters often confront enduring torment without hope for redemption or healing, viewing pain as an indelible component of existence. Her work, Convalescence (2013), depicts chronic pain as inseparable from the human condition. As much as her writing is grounded in Korean history, her treatment of body and soul is immensely universal.