South Korean author wins Nobel Prize in Literature

South Korean author Han Kang has won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The 53-year-old novelist is a former winner of the Man Booker International Prize for her 2007 novel The Vegetarian.

At the ceremony she was praised “for her intense poetic prose that grapples with historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life.”

The Nobel Prize Committee has awarded the literary prize since 1901 and this is the 18th time a woman has won the prize.

She won 11 million crowns (£810,000). the amount awarded to each Nobel Prize winner this year.

Han is the first South Korean laureate described by the Nobel Prize Committee as someone “dedicated to music and art.”

The statement also added that her work pushes boundaries by exploring a wide range of genres – including violence, grief and patriarchy.

A turning point for her career came in 2016, when she won the International Man Booker Prize for The Vegetarian – a book published almost a decade earlier but first translated into English by Deborah Smith in 2015.

It shows the violent consequences for a woman who refuses to submit to the norms of food intake.

Han's other works include The White Book, Human Acts and Greek Lessons.

The Swedish Academy's permanent secretary, Mats Malm, said at the ceremony that she was “not really prepared” to win the prize.

The committee's chairman, Anders Olsen, also said she “confronts historical traumas and invisible systems of rules and exposes the fragility of human life in each of her works.”

He praised her “poetic and experimental style” and called her “an innovator of contemporary prose.”

The chairwoman added that she had “a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead.”

Han is the first female winner of the literary prize since 2022 awarded to the French writer Annie Ernaux.

She is also the first female Nobel Prize winner this year.

The prize is awarded for a body of work rather than a single article – there is no shortlist and is notoriously difficult to predict.

Han is the daughter of writer Han Seung-won and was born in the South Korean city of Gwangju.

She moved to the capital Seoul at a young age and studied Korean literature at a university in the city.

Her first published works were five poems in 1993, and the following year she made her fiction debut with a short story.

Han, who taught creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts and is writing her sixth novel, has been published in more than 30 languages.

Last year's price was The winner was the Norwegian writer Jon FossePrevious winners include Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, Kazuo Ishiguro, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Bob Dylan.