Top Stories 25/02/19 Han Kang, Nobel Prize for Literature 2024

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The Vegetarian, the novel that brought Han international fame, was written in 2007

Han Kang (Photo: Wikipedia)

By Diego Mattei SJ

Published: February 19, 2025 10:51 AM GMT

Updated: February 19, 2025 11:11 AM GMT

In 2024, for the first time, an Asian woman won the Nobel Prize for Literature. She is Han Kang, South Korean, born in 1970, daughter of the writer Han Seung-won. The Swedish Academy awarded her the coveted prize “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life.”

“Han Kang,” the citation reads, “has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style she has become an innovator in contemporary prose.”

The choice came as a surprise because she is a relatively young author with a limited output, about twenty titles, including poetry, a few short stories, eight novels and some essays. Moreover, it is one of the few times that the award has been given to a writer who expresses herself in a non-European language.

Before Han Kang, we have to go back to the Chinese Mo Yan in 2012, the Japanese Kenzaburo Oe in 1994, the Egyptian Naghib Mahfuz in 1988 and again the Japanese Yasunari Kawabata in 1968.

Born on November 27, 1970, in the city of Gwangju, Kang was nine years old when she moved with her family to Seoul, where she studied Korean literature and has now been teaching creative writing for several years. The Nobel Prize was preceded by other prestigious international awards, including the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 for The Vegetarian, and the Malaparte Prize in 2017 for Human Acts.

In this article we will present, in the order in which they were written, six of the most significant Han publications to have been translated into English: Convalescence; My Woman’s Fruits; The Vegetarian; Greek Lessons; Human Acts; and We Do Not Part. The poetic path taken by the Korean writer, who in 1993 began the literary research that has led her to the Nobel Prize, remains to be discovered.

Read the complete article here.

This article is brought to you by UCA News in association with "La Civiltà Cattolica."

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