STOCKHOLM: South Korean creator 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 mentioned 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 novel consciousness of the connections between physique and soul, the residing and the useless, and in her poetic and experimental model has turn into an innovator in modern prose,” Anders Olsson, chairman of the academy’s Nobel Committee, mentioned 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 few poems within the journal Literature and Society, whereas her prose debut got here in 1995 with the brief 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 considered her main worldwide breakthrough.
In “The Vegetarian”, after scuffling with ugly recurring nightmares, Yeong-hye, a dutiful spouse, rebels towards societal norms, forsaking meat and stirring concern amongst her household that she is mentally unwell.
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 Arms”, 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 mentioned 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 lots of different perennial potential candidates corresponding to Kenya’s Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Australia’s Gerald Murnane and Canada’s Anne Carson.
“I used to be capable of speak to Han Kang over the telephone,” Mats Malm, Everlasting Secretary of the Swedish Academy instructed a press convention.
“She was having an odd day, it appears, she had simply completed supper along with her son,” he mentioned.
The literature prize is probably the most accessible of the Nobels for a lot of and, as such, the Academy’s selections are met with reward and criticism, usually in equal measure.
The Academy’s omission of literary giants corresponding to 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 in addition seen as a snub to authors in additional conventional genres.
The prizes, for achievements in science, literature and peace, have been created by way 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 probably the most consideration, thrusting authors into the worldwide highlight and yielding a spike in e book gross sales that may, nevertheless, be comparatively short-lived for authors who will not be family names.
Even so, the prize cash and a spot on a listing that features luminaries corresponding to 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 creator 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.
