The South Korean author Han Kang, 53, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2024, as announced today Thursday by the Swedish Academy, the institution that awards the award. The jury highlighted his “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” The narrator had had “a normal day and had just had dinner with her son” when she received the call most desired by the writers, according to the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Mats Malm, after revealing Kang’s name. The largest literary award in the world is worth 11 million Swedish crowns (about 970,000 euros), in addition to guaranteeing an increase in prestige, fame and book sales for whoever receives it.
Han Kang (Gwangju, South Korea, 1970) began his career as a novelist by winning the Seoul Shinmun spring literary competition in 1994. He won the 2016 International Booker Prize with The vegetarian (Rata), his first novel translated into English, a suffocating portrait of the isolation in which a person can immerse themselves by changing without the permission of others. With The white paper competed again for the same award, although this time only was a finalist. Last year he published in Spain Greek class (Random House Literature), a cry of silence in which voice and language fight against their annihilation. The author was among the betting favorites, but not among the first. The English houses placed her at the level of the Spanish Enrique Vila-Matas: her victory was paid 33/1.
BREAKING NEWS
The 2024 #NobelPrize in Literature is awarded to the South Korean author Han Kang “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” pic.twitter.com/dAQiXnm11z— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 10, 2024
Over the last decade, the Swedish Academy has opted for greater diversity in its elections, both in the origins of the winners (European, African and Chinese) and in the genres, from the reporting of Svetlana Alexievich to the songs of Bob Dylan. Last year the Norwegian Jon Fosse won, and in 2022 the Frenchwoman Annie Ernaux.
The last award to a Spanish speaker, Mario Vargas Llosa, was 14 years ago; The previous one is from 1990, to Octavio Paz. Writers in Spanish have 11 winners, compared to 29 in English, 16 French, 15 German or six Italian. On the list of winners, throughout history, names such as WB Yeats, Ivan Bunin, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, Camilo José Cela, Nadine Gordimer, Wislawa Szymborska, JMG Le Clézio, Patrick Modiano, Orhan Pamuk, Gabriel García appear Márquez, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow or Herta Müller. Jean-Paul Sartre, awarded in 1964, was the only author to reject the Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as its financial award, for fear that it would affect “the impact of his writings” and avoid being “institutionalized.”
Babelia
The literary news analyzed by the best critics in our weekly newsletter
RECEIVE IT
#Han #Kang #Nobel #Prize #Literature