Chosen by the Stockholm Academy for her ability to address “historical trauma and human fragility,” the 53-year-old author is also the first Korean to win this prestigious award. With The vegetarianhis most famous novel, addressed the collective wounds of his country, such as the massacre perpetrated in 1980 by the military in Gwangju, his hometown.
Stockholm () – The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded for the first time to an Asian writer. The Commission that assigns the prestigious recognition announced today in Stockholm that for 2024 the choice has fallen on Han Kang, a 53-year-old Korean author, awarded – says the official justification – “for her intense poetic prose that addresses historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.
It is the first time that the Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded to a Korean author and the second Nobel Prize in total that the country has received. Indeed, the only precedent until now was the Nobel Peace Prize awarded in 2000 to then-president Kim Dae-jung. The Stockholm academics’ decision also in some ways reflects the growing interest in Korean culture globally, which from music to television series has gained immense popularity around the world.
Daughter of Korean writer Han Seung-won, Nobel Prize winner Han Kang was born in Gwangju on November 27, 1970. She grew up in Seoul, where she attended Yonsei University and debuted in 1993 with the publication of a collection of poems, although later He moved on to prose. Multifaceted author, she established herself internationally with the translation of her novel The vegetarianwritten in 2007 and winner of the International Booker Prize in 2016. It tells the story of a woman whose decision to stop eating meat becomes a deep chain of wounds within her family circle, with devastating consequences. Precisely the deep intertwining between the materiality of the body and the meanderings of the spirit is one of the characteristic features of his writing.
Another extremely significant work is human actsa novel written in 2014 and dedicated to the Gwangju massacre of 1980, one of the most atrocious pages of the military repression of democratic movements in South Korea. Han Kang goes through it trying to give voice to all the victims of the story, and uses a particular resource for narration: the souls of the dead, separated from their bodies, are the ones who witness their own annihilation and tell it.
We don’t separatepublished in Korean in 2021 – of which the English translation is being prepared – analyzes another wound in Korean history: the massacre on the island of Jeju, between 1948 and 1949, when thousands of people were killed in a revolt classified as collaborationism with communist forces. “This book – says the president of the Nobel Committee Anders Ollson in the profile dedicated to Han Kang – portrays the process of shared mourning undertaken by the narrator and her friend Inseon: long after what happened, both carry within themselves the associated trauma to the catastrophe suffered by her relatives With images as precise as they are condensed, Han Kang not only conveys the power of the past over the present, but also traces, with equal force, the friends’ inflexible attempts to bring to light what has happened. fallen into collective oblivion and transform their trauma into a common artistic project, which gives the book its title.
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