South Korean writer Han Kang, whose internationally groundbreaking novel The Vegetarian it was made into a film and won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Swedish Academy unveiled the prize on Thursday, praising “his intense poetic prose that addresses historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life.”
The Vegetarian tells the story of Yeong-hye, a graphic artist and part-time housewife from Seoul, whose decision to stop eating meat leads to mental health issues and problems in her family life. Baby Buddha
The honor is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, in 1895. The others are prizes in chemistry, physics and medicine, in addition to the Nobel Peace Prize.
Second ReutersHan Kang is the first South Korean to win the major literary prize.
The Chinese author Can Xue, the Canadian Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale), the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, the British-American novelist of Indian origin Salman Rushdie, stabbed in 2022 before giving a conference in New York, and the American Don DeLillo were among others. according to bookmakers, the favorites mentioned to win this year's literary prize.
The 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature went to Norwegian author Jon Fosse, while the 2022 prize was awarded to French author Annie Ernaux, whose autobiography It's happening was adapted for the big screen by director Audrey Diwan as the abortion drama of the same name that won the Golden Lion at the 2021 Venice Film Festival.
Since 1901, the literary prize has been awarded to an author of any country who, according to Nobel's will, wrote “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” It is presented by the Swedish Academy.
Past winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature include the American writers Toni Morrison and Saul Bellow, the English Harold Pinter and William Golding, the Irishman Samuel Beckett, the Canadian Alice Munro, the South African Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee, the Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the French Jean-Paul Sartre. , the German Gunter Grass, the Turkish Orhan Pamuk and the Chinese Mo Yan.
In 2016, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan won the honor.