The Western world is finally realizing the depth and impact of South Korean modern culture. After TV series, music and movies, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature goes to Han Kang, whose most famous novel The Vegetarian already won the prestigious Man Booker International Prize in 2016.
Han Kang, the Swedish Academy announced, won “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” Born in 1970 in the city of Gwangju, she moved with her family to the capital Seoul when she was nine years old. Her father is also a successful novelist. Her first publication came in 1993 with a poetry cycle in the magazine “Literature and Society.” In 1995 came the first collection of short stories, followed by other collections and the first novels.
Among the most famous, Black Deer, Greek Lessons, Thy Cold Hands. The latter bears obvious traces of Han Kang’s interest in art. The book reproduces a manuscript left behind by a missing sculptor who is obsessed with making plaster casts of female bodies. There is a preoccupation with the human anatomy and the play between persona and experience, where a conflict arises in the work of the sculptor between what the body reveals and what it conceals. “Life is a sheet arching over an abyss, and we live above it like masked acrobats” as a sentence towards the end of the book tellingly asserts. Her next novel in 2025 will be We Do Not Part.
The Vegetarian, originally written as three novellas and later turned into a full length narrative, describes the violent consequences for the protagonist Yeonh-hye when she refuses to submit to the norm on food intake.
Anders Olssen, chairman of the Nobel Committee, says Han Kang writes about a double exposure to pain, a correspondence between mental and physical torment that has close connections to Eastern philosophy. “She 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.”
