The Nobel Prize in Literature 2024 Han Kang The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2024 is awarded to the South Korean author Han Kang “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

Han Kang has won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy announced Thursday, becoming the first South Korean writer to receive the honor.

The award-giving body said Han was awarded the prize “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life. “

Han is the second South Korean Nobel laureate after President Kim Dae Jung, awarded the Peace Prize in 2000, and the first Asian female winner of the Literature Prize.

The 53-year-old is best known for her 2007 novel The Vegetarian, which won the International Booker Prize for fiction in 2016. The book portrays the violent consequences that ensue when the female protagonist decides not to eat meat, and her behavior is rejected by her husband and authoritarian father.

In “Human Acts,” published in 2014, Han employed a historical event that took place in the southwestern city of Gwangju, where hundreds of pro-democracy students and other civilians were killed by the South Korean military in 1980.

Han was born in 1970 in Gwangju.