Han Kang, “The Vegetarian” author, wins the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature

The South Korean writer Han Kang, whose international breakthrough novel The vegetarian was made into a film and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2024.

The Swedish Academy introduced the laureate on Thursday and praised “her intense poetic prose that deals with historical trauma and reveals the fragility of human life.”

Hans novel from 2007 The vegetarianher first novel, translated into English, won the International Booker Prize in 2015. The story of Yeong-hye, a part-time graphic artist and housewife whose decision to stop eating meat leads to mental health issues and problems in her family, Life was adapted into a feature film by Woo-Seong Lim and screened at Sundance in 2010.

The honor is one of five Nobel Prizes established in 1895 by the will of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. The others are prizes in chemistry, physics and medicine as well as the Nobel Peace Prize.

Han Kang is the first South Korean to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Chinese author Can Xue, the Canadian Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale), Japanese writer Haruki Murakami (combustion, Drive my car), Indian-born British-American writer Salman Rushdie (Midnight Children), who was stabbed in 2022 before giving a lecture in New York, and American Don DeLillo (White noise) were among the other favorites for this year's literary prize, according to bookmakers.

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature went to Norwegian author Jon Fosse, while the 2022 award went to French author Annie Ernaux, whose autobiography happening was filmed by director Audrey Diwan as an abortion drama of the same name, which won the Golden Lion at the 2021 Venice Film Festival.

Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to an author from each country who, according to Nobel's will, has written “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” It is presented by the Swedish Academy.

Previous winners include US writers Toni Morrison and Saul Bellow, Britain's Harold Pinter and William Golding, Ireland's Samuel Beckett, Canada's Alice Munro, South Africa's Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee, Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez, France's Jean-Paul Sartre, Germany's Gunter Grass and Turkey's Orhan Pamuk and China's Mo Yan.

Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan won the award in 2016.